


Winter Refused

by JuniorMintJulep



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:42:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26304340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniorMintJulep/pseuds/JuniorMintJulep
Summary: A figure from Chekov's past returns. Four scientists are dead. On a remote, icy planet, a landing party is stranded, at the mercy of a force whose insatiable hunger may tear them apart. OC in the prologue. Takes place after Into Darkness. Profanity, violence, one suggestive scene, and one scene with dialogue that could be perceived as sexually threatening, but is not explicit.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> OC is in the prologue only. Don't worry, we'll get boldly going with our favorite crew in the next chapter.

Stardate 2261.33

K''am Khangolia system

* * *

Winifred Malloy was no slacker.

She prided herself on her work ethic: her willingness to log overtime in the lab, to dig deeper in the field even when frostbite threatened, and to study hours uncounted when Terran holidays shut down the libraries. She had excelled in university, though she suspected—in her perpetual self doubt—that it was only through sheer determination. She finished her first degree in three years, attending classes and fieldwork year-round, then went straight into a graduate program at the Vulcan Science Academy, pushing despite her advisor's misgivings to earn a prized internship with one of the top xenovolcanologists in the Alpha quadrant.

So, yeah, Winnie was not afraid of hard work, as she reminded herself each day.

But even she had to admit, as she trudged her way along, huffing and puffing in the cold through the pathway carved into the deep snow, that she was about tuckered out, as her grandpa used to say. The icy walls on either side felt protective on a good day, but now they towered over her in oppressive silence, and she tilted her head up to take in the deep purple of the sky, fighting off a flutter of claustrophobic panic. It was silent today, with not even a breeze to kick up the loose snow.

With a quick, final lunging step she reached the entrance to the immense complex that housed their makeshift workspace on this little snowball of a planet and sighed in annoyance, her breath creating a fog around her face. There was a tall, stately door at least four meters high with intricate carvings and a hefty handle; next to it was a miniature, utilitarian version cast from a duranium alloy, an entry pad inset along the right side. Whoever had last used the palm scanner had left some sort of residue on it, something green and suspiciously sticky-looking, and had neglected to clean it. She knew the device was finicky already, so she peeled off a glove, then swiped at her runny nose before bypassing the scanner and tapping the required alpha numeric code into the keypad instead. It beeped and flashed green, and the door swung open slowly with a creak. She stepped through, pausing as it closed just as noisily, and made a mental note: _Need to bring the anti-corrosive spray down next time._

Inside was slightly warmer, not as much as she expected, and the silence just as deep. The entryway was dim, the walls constructed of a deep gray granite-like material flecked with lighter bits and polished to a sheen that reflected her like a funhouse mirror. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection, set her walking poles in the corner, then leaned against the wall and lifted first one foot, then the other, grunting as she tugged her snow boots off and set them on the floor next to three other pairs. Her waterproof, insulated socks would be enough to keep her feet warm once she got closer to their quarters, and she didn't want to track sludgy snowmelt through the complex.

Next was her unwieldy gear bag, holding her one-person tent, heat lantern, portable resonance neutralizer, and comm equipment, which had—to her everlasting irritation—suddenly stopped functioning yesterday. She'd called into base to advise that she was heading back and give her ETA, but received no response. The team had already gone through three backup comms: the infrasonic interference here was brutal on the delicate transducers, but she thought there was another spare in her locker, back in her quarters. Unless the situation had improved in the last few days— _maybe we were all just a little stir-crazy, maybe we can get a doc patched through to do a remote visit_ —they were going to need to call for assistance before their next scheduled supply ship.

She knew that their team had been fortunate to be able to use this structure, still relatively intact after thousands of years. Most of the exterior walls were wrapped in layers of winter precipitation and insulated from the worst of the cold. It was well-preserved and they speculated it had been a place of learning in its time, before the population died off suddenly and without explanation. On the main floor there were vast auditoriums, libraries, and galleries filled with various types of artwork; above were smaller areas that seemed to be study rooms or offices. Starfleet had furnished one of those rooms with all the comforts of home (well, as comfortable as government-issued furniture could be) and the equipment and supplies that they would need in their excavations.

On feet that were still mostly numb she padded silently through the main hallway. It was more of an atrium really, in a way that reminded her of old Earth Roman architecture: a covered skylight above and a long-empty shallow, sunken pool with an ornate fixture in the center that may have at one time been connected to the water supply. Beyond that, a grand staircase swept up towards the second floor.

Her first impression upon entering the complex, so many months ago, had been that the people who had built it, worked in it, studied in it, must have been massive creatures. The proportions of the stonework, furnishings, and decor were outsized for a typical humanoid, and she often felt Lilliputian as she wandered through the space in her spare time, climbing into a chair in one of the sitting areas and dangling her legs above the floor, or stretching on her tiptoes to examine left-behind items in the dusty common areas—for these people, like those in the Roman city of Pompeii—seemed to have died or disappeared in haste, without taking time to gather up their belongings. They were about a week into their assignment when they stumbled upon the first skeletal remains and confirmed the obvious: the natives had been huge by human standards, the adult remains averaging around three meters.

Gods, she was tired. She looked up at the stairs, stretching into shadows above, and, grasping the handrail, steeled herself for the climb. One of the first modifications they had made was adding supplemental steps to the staircase, but climbing up and down them was still a chore. Three days out there was about as much as she could handle before the cold began to seep into her very bones, and she didn't look forward to dealing with the broken blisters she could just begin to feel as her feet tingled with the first nettles of thawing. On top of the physical discomfort, the larger resonance neutralizers at the perimeter of the building had recently begun to falter, which left them all increasingly on edge and battling some unpleasant side effects from the incessant infrasonics. About halfway up, she started to slow her pace, and realized that she was reluctant to return to their living quarters, fearful of what further transformations the rest of her team may have undergone in her absence.

At the top of the staircase she turned right and headed toward a doorway a dozen or so steps down on the left. She touched the sensor built into the doorjamb and it swung open, then she stopped in her tracks and her breath caught.

Winnie was not afraid of hard work, or pitching a tent on a scarp above an active volcano, or living on a ball of ice in the middle of the galactic boondocks. She wasn't afraid of falling off of a rock face or getting buried under an avalanche. She was, if she had to be brutally honest with herself, a tiny bit afraid of failure. But most of all, what could freeze her in place and make her whimper, make her hands shake and her bowels cramp, what Winifred Malloy could never admit to anyone, was that she was afraid of the dark.

She shivered and dearly regretted leaving her lantern behind now.

She should have noticed it earlier, as she climbed the steps: the utter silence here. There was always some kind of background noise, even in their sleep cycle: the light fixtures that buzzed no matter how much percussive maintenance was applied, the on/off cycle on the cooling unit where Phinn kept his samples, the swishing of water in the washroom or kitchen area, voices or laughter or sometimes snoring at night. But there was none of that now, no sounds that she could detect as she stood there rooted in place at the entrance, holding her breath and listening so hard that her ears rang.

Through the skylight, the last feeble rays of the tired little sun filtered through the precipitation- and dust-streaked glass, on its track down to the horizon. It provided just enough light for her to see about two meters into their work space. Their quarters, created by partitioning a larger open space, was obscured in inky darkness. Even if it were the dead of night, there should have been indicator lights on the lab equipment, a gentle glow from a small overhead by her lab bench that always stayed on, the tiny blinking dots on the communications equipment. She suddenly realized the absence of the deep, distant hum of the generator and shivered.

"Phinn? Knox?" she called out softly. "Guys?" There was no response.

T'Mar, well, truth be told, even though she was her superior officer she couldn't be bothered about her, but Phinn... _Phinn should be here_ , an irrationally angry voice said in her head. And Knox. But the only sound she could hear was that of her own breath, shallow and uneven, a faint whistling in it that she hadn't heard in a long time. She'd had panic attacks before, when she was younger, and in the last few weeks they'd returned with a vengeance. She felt her heart rate and breathing accelerate. Slow it down, Winnie, she coached herself. You're being paranoid.

As her eyes adjusted to the wan half-light, she thought she could make out a faint shape on the floor. She squinted and leaned forward, bracing herself against the door frame. The shape resolved into a vaguely human outline, and a pair of boots that she would have recognized anywhere in the galaxy, with a delicate inlaid design carved into the soles. Phinn had nearly drained his credit account for those boots. She heard a faraway keening sound that she realized was coming from her own throat, but she was frozen in place, unable to move or think. Her heart galloped now, sending shudders through her body. _Nononononono not Phinn—_

"I've been looking for you."

She yelped and spun around, adrenaline unrooting her and thawing her limbs into action.

"T'Mar!" Relief flooded through her. She reached out to touch the other woman, but her hand dropped to her side as her good manners pushed through her panic. T'Mar's hair was disheveled, tumbling out of the tight bun it was always wrapped up in, and obscured half of her face. One slanted brow and pointed ear were still visible. But it was the one eye still visible—fathomless and manic—that caused Winnie's insides to seize up and the dark, irregular stains on T'Mar's parka that kicked Winnie's brain into an on-the-fly calculation of her odds of slipping around T'Mar and outrunning her. _Outrun a Vulcan, Winnie? No. She's faster, she's stronger, and something is very wrong with her. You've been in denial about how bad it's become. And besides, where would you go?_ It suddenly occurred to her that the sticky green fluid on the palm scanner was probably from T'Mar, but she had never actually seen Vulcan blood before. Not that it mattered at this point. She dredged up the last bits of her courage and drew a deep breath.

"T'Mar," she said, forcing a note of concern into her voice, "what happened here? Why is the heat off? And how did Phinn—" she swallowed back the words that threatened. "He looks like he's injured. Are you okay? Where's Knox?"

T'Mar blinked. "I was looking for you," she repeated. She shuffled forward and Winnie took a step back without thinking. "I looked everywhere."

"I was out in the field, T'Mar. You remember? But I'm back now. I'm here. I think we should call—I mean, is the comms equipment down here, too?" She was babbling now, she knew, but couldn't seem to stem the flow of words from her mouth. T'Mar stared at her, outwardly placid, but Winnie sensed something deep and barely constrained, something of fury and hunger, coursing through the woman. T'Mar began laughing, a faint rumbly sound. Winnie's breath quickened, and when she took another step backward her foot bumped into something. _That's Phinn. That's his leg or his boot,_ a small, reasonable voice said in the back of her head. _He's lying on the floor and he's probably dead, and Knox too. And I will be too, soon._ She felt a deep crease of sorrow folding into her soul, and squeezed her eyes shut against tears that threatened.

"T'Mar. T'Mar, please, is there something I can help with?" she asked, her words faltering, still feeling like this couldn't really be happening, wondering if this was just one of those awful nightmares she'd been having lately. She raised her hands, intuiting the futility of warding off an attack, unarmed as she was, since the only path left to her was backwards into the dark. She laughed inside, realizing that though there was death behind her and death before her, the dark dredged up the greater terror.

"Tell me what's going on. Please." The Vulcan was inches from her now, breathing heavily. The ancient part of her brain willed her feet to fight or run now, now that the moment was upon her, but she could not move, could not breathe as T'Mar drew out a blade. It was one Winnie recognized from a collection of ceremonial knives the Vulcan kept hanging on her wall, T'Mar's sole concession to decor in her space. An image of her nephew, smiling so hard his eyes squinted shut, flashed to her. With a last, desperate rush of panic, Winnie lunged to the left, tunnel-visioned on the narrow space between T'Mar and the door frame, but the Vulcan was faster, moving to block her so quickly she was a blur. Winnie was grateful that her vision blacked out as T'Mar screamed and raised the gleaming weapon above her. A voice shrieked in her head _This is not supposed to happen this is not supposed to happen oh gods what is happening—_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Irina Galliulin was a one-shot character in the Original Series episode "The Way to Eden." Yeah, that one, the one with the space hippies. So I thought it would be fun to bring her back in the alternate universe.

_Captain's personal log, stardate 2261.95_

_After a quick layover at Starbase Eleven for a routine resupply and crew transfers, we have orders to proceed to the K''am Khangolia system. I am somewhat unsettled by these orders but will withhold judgment pending additional information I expect to receive shortly._

_On a happier note, I've been asked to officiate the wedding of Mikel Voorhees, Rayma Muñelos, and Yana Graydon. Note: block my schedule for the evening of 2261.113. And make sure the reception area has clearly visible signs regarding the, uh, nature of the activities that will occur. May need to draft up a waiver; have Spock check with the lawyers. But first, it's time to make someone's day a little less pleasant._

* * *

"I'm a doctor, not a pest control technician, Jim."

James Kirk pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed inwardly. Leonard McCoy, his friend, confidant, and Chief Medical Officer of the USS Enterprise, was unusually ornery this morning. Kirk suspected a caffeine deficiency could be in play, but did not discount the possibility of a few too many shots of bourbon the previous evening. Or, he thought, why not both? The good doctor swore by his motto of moderation in all things, but seemed to grant himself an exemption when it came to beverages with addictive properties.

Kirk rose from the table in the corner of the officers' mess, his chair scraping against the metal deck plates, and made his way to the food dispenser slots along the far wall. He gave a wave or an informal salute to the crew he passed, noting that most of them were finishing their morning meals and taking their trays to the recycler unit. A glance at the wall chrono confirmed the imminent changeover from gamma to alpha shift.

He turned his attention back to the food dispenser, and called up the menu for caffeinated beverages. _Coffee. Large. Hot._ His finger hovered over, then tapped, the "extra shot" option. Cream? _Yes._ Sugar? _Hell, yes._ Shaved chocolate or whipped cream? He deliberated, but decided not to push the good doctor too far today.

Suddenly the room was empty except for Kirk and McCoy. He sat down, slid the mug across, and tapped his fingers against the table top to get the doctor's attention. McCoy looked up at him, a glower turning his blue eyes stormy. He was impeccably turned out as always: uniform spotless, hair regulation and neatly combed; but his slumped posture and the dark circles under his eyes sent a clear signal that all was not well in his universe.

"Heard the medical department had a celebration last night, Bones."

The doctor swiped his hand across his face and groaned. "Lieutenant Phillips was nominated for an award in pharmaceutical mycology," he said. "The staff thought that was party-worthy."

Kirk's eyebrows furrowed. "Mycology…that's—"

"Yeah, fungus. Fungi, whatever."

"And that's a part of Medical?"

"Technically, yes. Look, Jim," McCoy leaned forward, picked up the mug, and took a long swallow. His eyes closed and he nodded. "Oh, that's better. Look, this is ridiculous. I don't have time to—"'

"Bones," Kirk cut in, his voice pitched loudly enough to cut short the doctor's lecture. "It's not negotiable. After our tribble incident on K7, HQ put out new emergency regs. You know this, because you submitted many colorfully-worded comments and then, under protest, signed a form acknowledging your receipt of said regulations." McCoy opened his mouth to object but Kirk ignored him. "I can refresh your memory if you'd like. It goes something like this: 'The medical department is responsible for the operation and supervision of the pest control program. Guidance may be found in the _Fleet-wide Shipboard Pest Control Manual_.' Oh," he pulled a data chip out of his pocket. "Here's a copy of that _Manual_. You know, just in case you want to read up on all the details."

McCoy glared at him, eyes narrowed. "Since when did you become such a stickler for regulations, Captain?"

Kirk refused to take the bait. He stood and stretched his arms over his head. "The cargo handling staff are expecting you any minute now. We're taking on," he glanced at his tablet, "one thousand two hundred and twelve kilos of fresh produce in stasis containers, eight crates of live biological specimens, and sixteen varieties of live botanicals. Oh, and two new crew members."

"Live botanicals? That's for Sulu, isn't it? I'm telling you, Jim, that man needs to pick a hobby and stick to it—"

"Now, Bones."

"Yessir, Captain, sir," McCoy muttered and rose, coffee mug clutched in one hand as he shoved away from the table. He swept his arm toward the doorway. "Please, after you."

The corridor was filling up with crew coming off of the night shift, making their way to the rec areas or mess halls. The two headed toward the nearest lift, dodging a cluster of Tur'qoo, deep in conversation with itself, and a pair of DOT-7s chattering softly as they glided toward Engineering.

"So who are these new crew members, Jim?"

Kirk stopped at the lift doors. "A new yeoman and a xenovolcanologist. Oh," he paused in the entrance and turned back to McCoy, ignoring the polite beeping from the door alarm, "I hear one of them used to have a thing with Chekov." He finally released the door and disappeared into the bowels of the ship.

"A thing, hmm?" McCoy bounced on his heels for a moment, intrigued. " _A thing_. Well, we'll see about that," he said to himself, suddenly feeling much more sprightly.

* * *

Pavel Chekov didn't like surprises.

He was a scientist, after all. He liked order, predictability, rationality. Math was his first language, Russian his second. Serving under James Kirk may have at times injected some chaos theory into his own internal universe, but he remained fundamentally anchored by his confidence in the certitude of laws and constants. There was not much room for randomness in Pavel Chekov's working model of the cosmos.

So when he bumped into someone in the corridor outside sick bay—actually bumped into her, because the thoughts in his head were so tangled up in the as-yet unsolvable Ke-Roganta Conjecture that he wasn't paying attention and had drifted over into oncoming foot-traffic—he was not only startled but momentarily speechless.

The woman he had bumped into was not, however.

"Pavel?"

He wasn't sure it was her, at first. Her hair, once long and wavy, was now shaped into a severe bob that fell just below her chin. She had always favored a skirt with her Academy uniform, but had traded it out for the traditional black trousers and tunic. Most striking, though, were her eyes. They were blue-gray, and in his memory they were merry and mischievous, and reminded him of his mother's favorite cat. Now they were flat and unreadable, murky as the waters of the Bay on a gloomy day. Purplish circles shadowed under them.

"Irina." It came out as a croak and he flushed. "Irina." There, that was better. He pushed away a flash of memory from years ago: the tingling anticipation of sliding his fingers into that hair for the first time.

"I had thought we might encounter each other." She tilted her head in a way that brought back another rush of warm memories, and when she slipped into their own language he broke into a smile, but her voice was cool and distant. His heart lurched.

"You knew I was on the _Enterprise_?"

"I had heard. I came aboard at Starbase Eleven. I just finished my onboarding exam with your Doctor McCoy. He is very nosy, no?" She took in his uniform, then gave him a questioning glance. "You are command division?"

He cleared his throat. "Ah, yes, I am a navigator."

"Navigator?" Both of her eyebrows went up. "You have given up your science, then?"

"No, of course not," he said, more defensively than he intended. "It is simply...more applied than theoretical now. But Irina," he reached for her hand, so small and delicate, and she let him pull her aside, away from the main corridor and all the curious eyes. "I came back to look for you," he said, stepping closer and bending his head near hers so he could whisper. "After...after Vulcan, and Nero...I looked, Irina. Where did you go?" He searched for something, anything, in her eyes—regret, longing, pain—but she was unreadable, and he grieved for whatever had snuffed out the joy and playfulness he remembered there.

She pulled her hand away and stepped back, shaking her head. "No, Pavel. I don't want to...not yet, I have to go now."

"But, Irina, please." He reached out again, brushed against one of her fingers, but it was too late. She spun away from him and Pavel stared at her retreating back, wondering what had gone wrong.

* * *

"What went wrong, Jim, is that her sister was on Vulcan. Her only living relative, by the way. She resigned her commission not long afterwards. Fleet made an exception, seeing as how she never served, and let her go."

McCoy finished refilling Kirk's glass and turned halfway to replace the bottle of Saurian brandy on the shelf behind him. He settled back into his chair and adjusted a cushion at the small of his back. He wondered how much it would cost to have his grandmother's old rocking chair shipped out to the far reaches of the Alpha quadrant.

Kirk had stopped by the doctor's quarters for a nightcap and they had, as was not unusual, fallen into conversation about the crew. If anyone had asked, the discussions were a means of apprising the captain of any medically-related concerns that may arise, but they both knew what was really going on: Kirk saw his crew at their best, generally, while McCoy saw everything else: the fallout of Kirk's decisions, the fears, the hurt, and worse. The captain needed to know how his crew was doing when he wasn't looking, and McCoy had his fingers on the pulse of everyone from the greenest cadet to the first officer. He swore the man had spies all over the ship.

"Don't give me that look, Jim. It's all in her personnel records. I'm not betraying her confidence here."

Jim had asked a simple question: what was the doctor's impression of their new ensign during her onboarding physical? And he'd gotten an earful in response. The volcanologist had not been shy in conveying her displeasure to McCoy when, making small talk during her exam, he inquired about her assignment to the _Enterprise_...

" _I did not request this assignment, Doctor_." He scanned the readouts on the monitors above her and frowned as he flagged several markers that were out of range.

_"Your inflammation profile is a little elevated, Ensign. Under some stress lately?"_

At that she had sat up so quickly he stepped back to avoid banging heads with her. _"Stress? I am here on this ship under duress. I left Starfleet years ago and was brought back under a reverse activation clause. Do you think that could be stressful, Doctor?"_ she snapped, and he noticed that, like Chekov, her accent was thicker when she was upset.

McCoy relayed this to Kirk, aghast at the notion. "What the hell is a reverse activation clause, anyway? That sounds like something Nogura would cook up, doesn't it?" He turned his tumbler around in his hand, the clinking of his ring against the glass the only sound in the room. The moment stretched out.

"What Nogura wants, Nogura gets," Jim replied absently. He slouched in the chair, legs stretched out in front of him, his drink untouched on the small table between them, his expression pensive.

McCoy noted all of this and decided to let the silence settle, a patience that came more easily to him now than it had in the past. He had dimmed the lights in his cabin, and he leaned back and allowed his eyes to drift to the stack of books on the side table, most with cracked spines and worn covers, bits of paper sticking out here and there to mark his place, because he had never been able to read just one at a time. Reading on a tablet was efficient, but reading a book was satisfying. The distant, steady thrumming of the engines, together with the pleasant smoldering of the brandy in the back of his throat, came together and made for a heaviness in his limbs. He tried to think through the next day's schedule to keep his thoughts from drifting but weariness tugged at his eyelids and he was tempted to surrender...

Kirk jumped out of his chair and McCoy startled, steadied the sloshing of his drink, then watched as the captain paced across the doctor's quarters. There wasn't enough room for a proper pacing, though, and he soon stopped, hands on his hips, and glowered at something only he could see.

"Spill it, Jim." McCoy felt his hard-fought patience quickly crumbling. He rubbed his face, trying to cover a yawn.

"I don't like this."

Before McCoy could open his mouth to respond, Kirk reached for the comm unit on the doctor's desk and tapped it. "Mister Spock—"

The door to McCoy's quarters slid open and the ship's first officer stood in the entryway, silhouetted against the evening-level lighting in the corridor. Kirk blinked in surprise.

"Captain," the Vulcan replied, and nodded a greeting in McCoy's direction. "Doctor. I thought I might find you here, Jim."

Kirk laughed, a small sound from the back of his throat, and waved at him. "Come in, Spock."

McCoy was going to offer Spock a chair, then remembered he only had two, and he was outranked.

"I do not mind standing, Doctor."

He scowled and wondered for the hundredth time if Spock was more telepathic than he let on.

Kirk gestured at the tablet in Spock's hands. "What did you find out?"

The Vulcan did not glance at the device as he spoke. "There is very little information available in Starfleet databases about the operation in the K''am Khangolia system. Not even a list of assigned personnel."

"Well, I have Uhura working her contacts, so hopefully we'll know more soon."

"Would someone like to tell me what the hell is going on?" McCoy demanded.

"We're headed to the K''am Khangolia system. This is confidential for now, per Commodore Mendez's orders."

"All right." McCoy tipped his hands up with an expectant look on his face. "Go on."

"All the Commodore told me is that there's some kind of scientific outpost there. Two Fleet scientists, two civilians. It's uninhabited, covered in ice, and the researchers suddenly ceased all outgoing communications about two months ago."

"So we're going to check it out? Why's that so top secret?"

"There's more. That ensign we picked up, um, what's—"

"Galliulin," Spock supplied helpfully. "Irina Galliulin. She is a geologist; more specifically, she is a volcanologist with extensive fieldwork in alien and arctic environments."

"Mendez said she was assigned to the Enterprise specifically for this mission. And that we are to beam her, and only her, down to the outpost. Once there, she will report on the status of staff, and if necessary personally download any and all research data and oversee the securing of that data. Then we are to return her immediately to Starbase Eleven."

"If necessary?" McCoy echoed. Those two words had jumped out at the doctor.

Kirk shot him a dark look. "You know what that means, Bones. They think the reason no one is communicating is that they can't communicate."

"Could just be a problem with their equipment."

Kirk allowed a grim smile. "That's why, even though Mendez specified that we beam down only Galliulin, we're also taking Uhura to check out their comms, and you," he nodded in McCoy's direction, "in case there is some kind of medical concern, plus Chekov and a security guard." He clenched his hands until his knuckles turned white. "I don't like this. It's irregular to send down just one person on this kind of away team. My gut tells me we're being used for something," he growled.

McCoy winced. There it was, the old menace that lurked at once far in the recesses of Kirk's head and right in front of him but invisible to him: the fear of losing control. Of losing command. Goaded by the deep-seated suspicion that he didn't quite belong here, that he had just been sucked up and dragged along in the wake turbulence of his father's brief but spectacular command. Defying the order to send down only Galliulin was, he suspected, Jim's way of clawing back some of his control of the situation.

"Jim," he said gently. Kirk's head snapped up and he stared at McCoy. "José is a decent guy. He'd tell you if there was something more he could share. You know that every starship captain has to deal with this sometimes."

Kirk gave him a long, probing look, then sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. "Yeah. You're right, Bones."

Spock clasped his hands behind his back and cleared his throat. "Is it possible the ensign has further insight into her assignment?"

Nice redirection there, McCoy thought. Maybe hanging around Uhura so much had taught the Vulcan a few human tricks.

Kirk brightened. "Couldn't hurt to ask. Good idea." He nodded. "Time to meet our newest officer, Bones," he said, clapping the doctor on the shoulder. "Goodnight, Spock. Staff meeting at 0830."

In the lift, Kirk realized he didn't know where he was going, and spent a moment muttering under his breath as he pulled up the ship's directory on his tablet and swiped through impatiently. The lift alarm began to chime. "Destination, please," it said.

"Ah. Here she is. Deck twelve," he called out, then turned to McCoy. "What about her and Chekov?"

"I didn't ask about it," he said. "She wasn't exactly in a chatty mood. What makes you think there was anything going on?"

"I remember seeing them together in the library sometimes, at the Academy," Kirk said. "Could have just been tutoring or working on a project, or maybe they just hung together because they knew each other before they came to the Academy. But it seemed like more than that. From a distance, anyway."

Jim was better than most at making quick judgments of nonverbal communication, so McCoy filed that byte of information away in the carefully curated collection of tidbits about the crews' personal lives that he kept on a shelf inside his head. The file labelled PAVEL CHEKOV was well-used and thicker than most, excepting Jim's and Uhura's. In the last few years, Pavel had spent more time than most in McCoy's office. He wondered what kind of woman would be a match for him, and what the time since losing her sister had done to her.

The lift came to a smooth stop. "Deck twelve," it said.

* * *

To Kirk's disappointment, confronting her in person shed no light on the situation: they had awoken her from a time-lagged nap, and she had denied any knowledge of her assignment beyond what he already knew.

"I am sorry, Captain," she said. After he waved her off when she stood at attention, she slouched on the edge of her bed, weariness—or apathy, Kirk wasn't sure—dragging through her voice, and stared at her toes. "They said only that they needed someone who knows volcanoes and ice. Apparently specialists of all types are in short supply these days."

Kirk knew that was true; he heard it from his department heads on a regular basis. Their staff did a lot of cross-training. So he didn't have a good response for her, and that bothered him more than he could admit.

In the corridor, McCoy waited for Kirk to say something, but the captain was silent, his jaw tight and eyes distant.

"How much longer?" the doctor asked. Kirk looked up at the ceiling and did some quick math.

"About sixteen hours."

"You could try to get through to Nogura, ask him to explain."

Kirk blew his breath out all at once and rubbed the back of his neck with a grimace. "Uhura's been trying. Says there's a lot of local interference."

"Of course there is," McCoy muttered. "Well, then, why don't you come to sick bay with me? Your friendly family doctor can take care of that headache for you."

The captain became very still, and shot a sideways glance at him. "You're spooky sometimes, you know that?"

McCoy grinned. "Just like to keep you on your toes, Jim."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I thought, why not bring back Janice Rand, too?

_Captain's log, stardate 2261.96_

_We will arrive at the K''am Khangolia system in approximately two hours and attempt to establish contact with the research team stationed there. The landing party will include Ensign Rand, Ensign Galliulin, Lieutenant Uhura, Ensign Chekov, Doctor McCoy and myself. Mister Spock has prepared a briefing document, appended._

* * *

"Barrows," he said, snagging the attention of a passing yeoman. "Push this out to the landing party at high priority, then enter it into the record." He passed his tablet to her. "Uhura, any response from the planet?"

"No sir, still quiet."

"Thank you. Keep trying. By the way," he added, "good work on the additional intel for Spock."

"It's good to have connections, Captain."

He smiled and flicked the comm unit on the arm of his chair. "Sick bay."

" _McCoy here_."

"Bones, check your inbox. You can skip to the last two paragraphs. Oh, and don't forget your mittens," he added.

* * *

McCoy had learned the hard way not to skip anything in a landing party briefing—he was still trying to live down the debacle at Sigma Iotia Two—so he skimmed through the dense, dry report:

_The K''am Khangolia system comprises a detached eclipsing binary star system including a Type A (primary) blue giant and Type K (secondary) orange dwarf star._

_Note: Remote observations have recorded frequent, severe coronal mass ejection events from the secondary star. These CMEs will likely disrupt planetary and ship operations during our mission._

_There is one planet in orbit around each star. The planet orbiting K''am Khangolia A has an S-type orbit that lies outside of the habitable zone._

_Our destination is the planet orbiting K''am Khangolia B. The planet has an S-type orbit with an orbital period of 27 hours, 0.96 G, and average surface temperature of -22 C. With the exception of a narrow equatorial area, the planet has a Koppen classification of EF (ice cap). Native flora and fauna are limited and of no threat to humanoids. Atmospheric composition is within acceptable ranges and will cause no deleterious effects._

_The planet is known colloquially as Marena. Prior archeological and anthropological surveys indicate it was once inhabited by a humanoid species that achieved primitive space flight; there is no indication it ever achieved warp capability. This species experienced an unknown catastrophic event that resulted in its sudden and complete annihilation approximately 8,000 Solar years ago. Several large urban areas have been observed, largely buried under snow and ice, as well as extensive agricultural developments._

_Personnel assigned to the outpost include civilian scientists Knox Cabrera (metallurgist), Phinnegan Brophy (geophysicist), and Starfleet officers Lieutenant Winnifred Malloy of Alpha Centauri (xenovolcanologist) and Lieutenant Commander T'Mar of Vulcan (mechanical engineer)._

_Note: Prior surveys have recorded multiple chains of volcanoes that exhibit unusually frequent and prolonged periods of activity, resulting in infrasonic waves of intensity, range, and composition that will result in significant psychoacoustic effects in humanoids. While the bill of lading for the expedition's initial supply requisition includes numerous portable and free-standing resonance neutralizing units, the current working condition of those units is unknown._

McCoy sighed. "Woulda been nice to know about that a little earlier," he grumbled to no one in particular.

"What's that, Doctor?" His head nurse, Tova, poked her head into his office.

After losing Chapel to a posting with a frontier medical group (he was still struggling with simmering resentment over _that_ ), he'd pored through more personnel profiles than he cared to remember before admitting they were all exceptionally qualified and picking one at random.

Then she had greeted him on her first day aboard with, "That's it, just Tova. Oh, and you should know I'm emetophobic."

 _Now what the hell am I supposed to do with a head nurse who's afraid of vomit_ , he had wondered at first, followed immediately by _How the hell did she get through nursing school?_ But then he remembered that he, CMO of the Starfleet flagship, was aviophobic, and decided that it would not be wise to cast stones at her glass house. He soon learned to appreciate her quick mind and a sassiness that reminded him of his favorite aunt.

She held out flimsy in his direction. "Here are the antigen results on Tormolen, by the way. They look good."

"Thanks. Can you round up a few extra vials of hydrocortilene, melorazine and improvoline for my kit? May come in handy."

She lifted an eyebrow. "Expecting to quell a riot down there?"

He snorted. "There's an old song that goes, 'Hope for the best, expect the worst'. I want that on my tombstone, by the way," he added.

"Duly noted. But not for a long time yet, Len. Have fun on your field trip." She winked and disappeared.

"Not very damn likely," he muttered.

* * *

Kirk arrived in the transporter room at five minutes from beam-down and counted only two of the landing party as present. A security guard stood near the control station, wrapped in standard Starfleet-issue cold weather gear. She gave him a level and unreadable gaze; he knew her from watching her spar with Sulu in the rec center. She was agile and quick on her feet, and often tossed the helmsman to the floor, as gently as possible, with no apparent effort.

"Rand."

"Sir," she replied in acknowledgement, and handed him a phaser.

Off to the side, Uhura was fumbling with the fasteners on the front of her coat. Scotty was seated at the control station, fiddling with the display inputs.

The door slid open to admit McCoy, who was looking more disgruntled than usual. His medkit was slung over one shoulder and a tricorder over the other, the sleeves of his coat bunched up underneath the strap. He tugged at his cuffs and gave an annoyed huff as he approached Kirk.

"Did you get my message, Captain?" Rand proffered a phaser and he took it without comment, but gave it a look of distaste as he affixed it at his waist.

"Yes, we'll check the neutralizers first thing." He waited one more minute, then moved to the control station and tapped the comm unit. "Ensigns Chekov and Galliulin, report to the transporter room immediately." He leaned over Scotty's station and swiped through the display for a few moments, frowning."I don't like the looks of this."

McCoy looked up from checking the contents of his medkit. "What's the hurry, Jim?"

"We're trying to outrun a CME."

"Aye. Could knock our transporters right offline," Scotty piped up.

McCoy froze midway through his equipment inspection. "What does _that_ mean?" he demanded. But before the engineer could launch into lecture mode, the door slid open a final time and Chekov entered, followed closely by Galliulin. McCoy thought Chekov's color was a little high. Galliulin was intent on straightening the thermal wrap around her neck. Kirk gave both of them a narrow glance, then turned to McCoy. "You wanted to say something before we leave, Doctor?"

All heads swiveled in his direction and he cleared his throat. "Ah, yes. You should all be aware that this planet produces unusually strong infrasonic waves. The staff down there should have set up resonance neutralizers around the structure we're headed for, but they were installed a while back and since they need to be replaced regularly, we don't know how well they're functioning. They should also have a number of portable neutralizers, but again, we don't know their condition." He paused, taking a moment to make eye contact with each member of the landing party. "If they aren't working properly, you might start feeling dizzy or nauseated after a while. Sometimes people feel anxious or irritable. That's normal. But—" he hesitated, wary of sowing seeds that might bloom into thickets of panic if left unchecked once they got down there, "if you feel anything more than that, let me know."

Rand held his gaze, cool and relaxed. _Good._ Uhura had finished struggling with her coat and was now adjusting her gloves around her fingers, not paying him much attention, but he wasn't worried about her; acoustics were her field of expertise and she knew what to expect. _Good_. Chekov glanced at Galliulin and she turned to him, as if their heads were connected with an invisible string, and he groaned inwardly at the intimate smiles they exchanged. _Ah, so there was a_ thing. _Not good._ Their apparent mutual fascination could be a liability in a demanding operation, and he considered pulling Kirk aside to advise a replacement, but the captain was already on the transporter pad.

"In case they have malfunctioned, we're beaming down a couple of neutralizer units as replacements. Where are you setting us down, Mister Scott?" Kirk asked.

"There's a structure the scientists noted in one of their reports so I'm using those coordinates. I'll pull the neutralizers inside of it, but I canna get a good read on the interior layout so I'll put ye down outside rather than risk materializin' you in a wall." The doctor blanched and Scotty gave him a lopsided grin. "Canna promise to get ye back out any time soon, though. That magnetic storm is coming in hot and fast. Don't ye worry, Doctor, we'll get ye there safe and sound. It's the comin' back I can't guarantee."

Unmollified but resigned to his fate, McCoy took his place on the transporter pad along with the others. He knew what was coming, and focused on breathing, because for some reason holding his breath made that feeling of being dissolved and sucked away even more horrifying, and the darkness and sensation of—

And then all at once his eyes came back along with the rest of him and he opened them and swallowed the nausea away, and it was over. He breathed and saw that he was standing with the other away team members about twenty meters from one of the most imposing buildings he had ever encountered. It rose at least thirty meters tall, casting a shadow that enveloped them and crept across the snow-covered terrain towards the horizon. It wasn't the height of the structure that was disconcerting, though; it was the relative scale of its features that made him feel diminutive and insignificant.

"Rand, you and Chekov walk the perimeter, find the resonance neutralizers and figure out their status," Kirk ordered. "Check in every ten minutes." Their _aye, sirs_ were muffled, absorbed by their scarves and the snow cover as they trudged off in opposite directions.

Kirk led the way to a covered terrace, and as they drew closer the outlines of a recessed entryway became visible. When they reached the main door, they looked up at the outsized handle. When Kirk reached up, his hand just brushed the bottom edge of it.

"Here, sir," Uhura said, pointing to the smaller door off to the side, an entry pad at humanoid height. The palm scanner had a dark smudge across the bottom half of it. Just underneath was a keypad, a prudent redundancy in a hostile environment that may not be amenable to removing protective hand coverings. Kirk knew none of their palm prints would open the doorway, nor could they guess the alphanumeric code.

"Why would they need controlled access? There was no one else here to keep out of the building," Irina wondered.

"Probably to track their location and activity," McCoy said. "You know, in case there was an emergency evacuation or someone couldn't be located." _Or if everyone suddenly stops communicating so they send a starship to figure out what's going on._ "Might be useful data to download, if we can find it."

"Everyone step back." Kirk drew his phaser and took aim, the blue-white beam lancing out, and then the sparks flew from the entry controls. After allowing the metal to cool for a moment, he nudged the door and it pushed inward with a metallic squeal. He stepped through and held his arms across the opening to block the others from entering as he swept his gaze around, then gestured at them to follow and they filed in one at a time.

Inside, they found themselves in an atrium, a massive skylight soaring above and a dormant fountain in the center of it. Further in the distance, an enormous staircase rose up to a second floor, where an open walkway stretched to both sides and overlooked the space below. To the left and right, the building stretched into wings that faded into shadows as far as they could see.

"This must be how Alice felt when she drank the potion," McCoy said, and his voice sounded small. No one was paying him any attention anyway. Kirk was turning in a slow circle, watchful, taking in the feel of the place. Uhura was frowning at her tricorder. McCoy pulled out his unit as well and Galliulin followed suit. After a moment he met their eyes, and they shook their heads.

"No life signs, Captain," the doctor reported. His breath puffed in the air. The ambient light from the skylight was feeble and did not penetrate beyond the central area. "They should have had a generator going, but it seems like it's out."

"I agree," Kirk said as he snugged the sleeves of his coat tighter around his wrists. He peered around, the muscles around his mouth taut, then relaxed when he spied the resonance neutralizer units Scott had beamed down a few meters away. "Uhura, you and Galliulin take a look around, see if you can find where the generator is located," he ordered. "Look for some sort of maintenance or machinery area, probably on a lower level, and call Scotty to see if he can help troubleshoot it. I want you to check in every ten minutes, too."

Galliulin and Uhura flicked on their torches and began making their way across the atrium.

Kirk let his gaze wander, his eyes flitting around and settling here and there. "Do you suppose this was some sort of military facility? A barracks? Or a government building?"

McCoy shrugged. "Hard to tell. Could be. Any ideas about where to start?"

The captain nodded toward the staircase. "Looks like that's been modified to make it more manageable for someone our size. Let's take a look upstairs."

The light canting through the skylight was quickly fading. They flicked on their torches and made their way slowly up the stairs; even with an extra step placed at each tread, they were uncomfortable for human-scale strides, and McCoy's calves were burning by the time they reached the top. They stood there for a moment, taking in the long rows of doorways on either side of the staircase, disappearing into darkness. A soft, organic material covered the floor up here, muffling their footsteps and the rustling of their coats as they turned to take in what little they could see in the gloom. McCoy slanted his torch down the hallway to his right, pausing at each doorway, until something caught his eye about ten meters down.

"Jim," he said quietly, and Kirk wheeled around, picking up a note in the doctor's voice that he had come to recognize. He added his torch beam to the doctor's, and the lights converged on the unmistakable profile of a pair of humanoid legs on the floor in one of the entrances, clad in insulating trousers but no boots, rigid and visible to mid-thigh through a slightly ajar doorway.

McCoy gave a soft sigh, then led the way down the corridor. The cold was beginning to draw sensation from his limbs, and when he stumbled over a wrinkle in the floor covering he muttered something under his breath that would have earned him more than a disapproving glare from his grandmother. When he reached the figure in the doorway he didn't bother with his tricorder yet, but fumbled with the glove on his right hand for a moment before it came loose. He pushed against the door with a grunt and slipped in, stepping carefully around the body. Kirk followed and crouched beside him as he placed a hand on the body's shoulder and rested it there for a moment in silence.

"This is Doctor Winifred Malloy," he said finally. He had pulled up personnel records for the outpost staff before they beamed down, and he knew that of the two females, she was the human. Her eyes were open, wide in horror, her mouth pulled into a grimace, blood splattered across her delicate features. A slash across her neck stretched from ear to ear, the edges of the flesh curling away from the wound, and a thick, dark spray across the surface of the door next to them told McCoy that at least the very end had been mercifully swift.

"When?" Kirk asked softly.

McCoy shook his head. "Hard to tell yet, with the temperature here. Extreme cold stops the process of decomposition. The generator must have gone off right around the time of death." He looked up, eyes narrowed as he tried to make out what lay beyond in the room. Kirk switched on and held a compact lantern he pulled from his kit and a bright glow filled the space from table-height up. It appeared to be living and working quarters for the researchers—a central living space with a small kitchen against the far wall and sitting area in the middle, a communications station and computer workstation off to the left, and a long lab bench with equipment and instruments against the right wall. Two doors at the back of the room led to what he presumed were private sleeping areas. Items in the space were in disarray, a lamp knocked over, a rug bunched up at one corner, a small sofa askew. Splatters and pools of dried blood were numerous and stark against the off-white floors and walls.

Everything was human scale in here, even down to false ceilings that dropped the room height, and underneath the chaos were the remnants of the people who had lived here: McCoy's sharp eyes picked out a tin of chamomile tea next to a chipped mug on the kitchen countertop, a brightly colored woven tunic thrown carelessly over the back of a chair, a child's drawing prominently displayed in a place of honor on the front of the cooling unit. _Oh gods_ , he thought as his heart sank, _I didn't think about kids they may have waiting back home_. He lowered his torch and caught a glimpse of another figure lying nearby, the torso half-hidden under a dining table. As he rose, knees protesting, the captain's communicator chirped.

"Kirk here."

" _Captain_ ," came Chekov's voice, tinny and distorted.

"Go ahead, Mister Chekov."

" _We have found the neutralizers and_ —" his voice broke up and static poured out of the unit. Kirk frowned and tapped at it, then the ensign's voice came through again. "— _not fully functioning._ _We also located the portable neutralizers in the entryway, and they are inoperative as well."_

"Copy that, Chekov," Kirk replied. "The two units Scotty beamed down are in front of an empty fountain. You and Rand come get them and then set them up at the perimeter."

A screech of static returned to him and he frowned and tapped at the controls. "Chekov?"

The channel cleared suddenly. " _Yes, sir, copy that. Chekov out_."

Kirk snapped the unit closed and stepped closer to McCoy, who was crouched over the second figure on the floor.

"Knox Cabrera. Multiple stab wounds," the doctor said shortly. He stood and peered into the two open doors farther back, dreading what he may find beyond them. _Just pick one_ , he scolded himself, but his legs wouldn't move and he felt his heart rate jump. In his peripheral vision he saw Kirk eyeing him curiously.

"Bones? You okay?"

He shook himself and the flash of paralyzing terror disappeared. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'll be better when Chekov and Rand get those neutralizers set up." He stepped toward the door on the left, torch held high, then there was a booming _whomp_ that seemed to resonate through the floor beneath him. He startled and grabbed the frame of the doorway to steady himself, suddenly lightheaded. Kirk had his phaser out, safety off, and pointed at the corridor doorway so quickly his arm was a blur. Then there was a smaller thump and the lights in the quarters came on, suddenly and at full strength. The monitors at the comms station lit up and emitted a series of beeps. Underneath the kitchen countertop, the cooling unit ticked then hummed as it powered up. They stared around the space, then at each other.

"Guess they found the generator," McCoy said, just to break the silence. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "We're as nervous as the prize turkey in November. It's the infrasound, that's all."

Kirk forced his shoulders to relax and lowered his phaser. "Chekov and Rand have probably picked up the new neutralizers and will have them up and running soon," Kirk said. He carefully slid the switch on his phaser and replaced it at his waist, unsettled at how easily his years of safety training had slipped away in the moment, then flipped his communicator open.

"Uhura."

The lieutenant's voice came through, distant and scratchy even with close proximity.

" _Yes sir, we were just about to check in. We found the generator and got it going_."

"We noticed," Kirk said wryly. "Good work. We're on the second floor, a few doors down on the right."

" _Copy. We'll be there in a minute. Uhura out_."

McCoy pushed away from the wall, confident that his legs would hold him up now, and moved into the first sleeping area. There he found the body of Phinnegan Brophy sprawled across one of the beds. He counted at least a dozen penetrative wounds and surmised that the final, fatal one was to his chest. When he stepped back into the communal space, Kirk gave him a questioning look.

"We're just missing the Vulcan. T'Mar." His eyes slid toward the second sleeping area then back to Kirk. "Jim, these people fought back. They have defensive wounds on their forearms and hands, their fingernails are torn off, and hell, Brophy's fingers are nearly amputated, probably from grabbing a blade to fight his attacker off."

"Any ideas about what happened?"

There were footsteps approaching in the hallway, then they halted. Kirk looked over his shoulder to see Uhura just outside, staring at the body in the doorway, then she scanned the space, face unreadable, taking in the rest of the scene. Galliulin slid in from behind and the color drained from her.

"What...what happened here?" Gullialin's voice was hollow, and Kirk gave her a sharp look.

"We don't know yet. We're trying to figure that out."

Uhura made her way gingerly across the room, averting her eyes from Cabrera's corpse, and sat at the cramped communications station. She plugged a portable power unit into the equipment, and her fingers flew over the display in a preliminary diagnostics program.

"Sit down, Galliulin," McCoy ordered in his brook-no-argument voice, "before you fall down." Then he nodded toward the next room. "Let's see what's in there."

What he found in there would be one of those flashbulb memories that for the remainder of his life would intrude without warning just as he was drifting off to sleep after a particularly difficult day, terrorizing that liminal space between wakefulness and slumber.

" _Jesus Christ_ ," he breathed as his gaze trailed slowly over the walls and then was drawn back, inexorably, toward the body that hung motionless in the center of the room. _T'Mar_. The false ceiling had been ripped away, savagely, exposing a beam above, over which she had flung a woven cord, tied into a neat hangman's knot. A chair turned on its side lay beneath her. A blade, smeared with what he guessed was both human and Vulcan blood, was half-hidden under the bed covering. He felt Kirk step in beside him. The captain closed his eyes for a moment and then turned away without speaking.

The clinical part of McCoy's brain acknowledged that suicide by hanging was an efficient and fairly reliable way to remove oneself, imminently logical even, but typically resulted in physical markers that caused understandable distress for those who came along afterwards. Ligature marks, the protruding tongue, and petechial hemorrhaging, commonly noted in the dry notes of forensics reports, were shocking for the average non-medical professional.

But this death was made more gruesome by the long lacerations down the length of her forearms, placed precisely over the Vulcan equivalent of the radial artery. Even for McCoy, the steady, deep cuts that she had made without any apparent hesitation caused him to look away briefly. She must have worked very quickly after cutting to have enough time before losing consciousness, but from those wounds had gushed enough blood to spell out in grisly splatters one word, over and over again, in a hideous dark green across the wall before she had placed that chair in the middle of the room, slipped that noose around her neck, and gave a final kick.

E'SHUA E'SHUA E'SHUA E'SHUA

McCoy forced himself to take a long, hard look, then took a deep breath and leaned out of the doorway. "Uhura, can you translate something from Vulcan?"

She rose from the comms station, but McCoy held up a hand. "No! No, don't. I'll bring it to you." He turned on his tricorder and framed one of the words up close, then snapped an image. Uhura stood, waiting for him, and when he held it up for her, she frowned.

"Is that—"

"Yes," McCoy cut her off. "It's blood. What does it mean?"

From the corner of his eye he saw the bouncing beam of a torch from the main corridor, then spotted Rand and Chekov standing in the entry, mouths agape. He turned back to Uhura.

"Demon. It means demon," she said in a very small voice.


	4. Chapter 4

McCoy had only a fraction of a second to ponder this before a brush of warm air wafted past his face and he realized they had a more urgent task at hand. "Captain, we need to move these bodies now that the generator is on."

Kirk grasped his meaning immediately, waved at Chekov and Rand to enter, and nodded. "I agree. Outside may be our best option. Help me carry her," he gestured at the body just inside the doorway.

"Winifred. Her name was Winifred Malloy," Galliulin said in a thick voice. "You will just take them out like that? Should we not at least wrap them in something first?"

McCoy gave her a curious look. "I...well, I don't see anything here that we could use that isn't already covered in blood, Ensign. Sheets, blankets, they're all...and that doesn't seem right, does it?" His words were blunt, but his tone was kind.

"Here." She stood and began pulling at the sleeves of her coat. "Take this for her."

Kirk placed a hand on her arm and she froze. "No. You won't compromise your safety for someone who can no longer benefit." Her glare at him was icy but he did not blink. After a moment she looked away, her jaw clenched.

McCoy thought back to the entryway, the collection of supplies, the frozen layer of snow melt pooled just inside the door, the pile of wraps and tarps. "I think I saw something we can use downstairs. We'll take care of them properly later, I promise, all right? We won't leave anyone behind."

After they made several trips up and down the stairs to place the first three bodies in a hollow in a snowbank a few meters from the entrance, then returned to the living quarters, McCoy looked around at the group. "Anyone have a knife I can borrow?"

After a moment Rand reached down, fumbled around the top of her boot, and drew out a knife in a black tool-worked sheath. She held it out, hilt first, and he accepted it with a nod. Somehow we wasn't surprised that of all of them, she was the one with a knife in her boot.

"I'll help," Jim said quietly, and they disappeared into the second sleeping area and closed the door behind him. When it was done, McCoy realized they couldn't carry her past the others, not in her condition, and decided a blood-smeared shroud was better than none; there was already more than enough trauma in this place to go around. He wrapped a coverlet around her, and when they emerged with her body, he handed the sheathed blade back to Rand as he passed and murmured a thanks.

They had just returned from placing her body with the others when Kirk's communicator beeped. He swallowed a sigh and flipped it open.

"Kirk here."

_"Captain, Spock here."_

He couldn't deny the relief he felt at hearing the Vulcan's calm, familiar voice. "Yes, Spock, go ahead."

_"Sir, I must inform you that the first in the series of coronal mass ejections we observed earlier will reach the planet in approximately ten point six minutes. At that time, although we will maintain our position on the far side of the planet, we anticipate we will lose communication and transporter capabilities, and we will be unable to pilot a shuttle through the geomagnetic storm to reach you in the event of an emergency. This initial disruption may continue for up to one point four hours, followed by an unknown time period to effect any necessary repairs to our systems. Do you wish to be beamed back aboard prior to this event?"_

He could feel the intensity of his crew's attention, and he was tempted to respond with," _Yes, absolutely, get us the hell out of here. We can come back later._ " None of them, himself included, relished the thought of staying in this place for an unknown span of time.

"When is the next one expected to arrive?"

_"In approximately three hours. It will be of much greater intensity and duration."_

_Leaving us stranded here for a while._ Spock left that conclusion unspoken, but they all understood the implication.

"We're staying for now, Spock. We need to find some answers down here. Take care of the ship, and we'll talk in a few hours."

_"Aye, Captain. Spock out."_

He snapped the communicator shut and looked around at his crew. Uhura was standing next to the comms station, arms crossed and expression unreadable. Galliulin edged closer to Chekov, worry creasing her forehead, and he gave her a reassuring glance. Rand stood up from slipping the knife back into her boot and securing it there, then met Kirk's gaze with a steely one of her own. The thought came seemingly out of nowhere, not for the first time, that if they had met somewhere else, in another time…McCoy was staring at the floor, a tautness in his jaw that Jim had learned to treat with care.

"Sounds like we'll be here for a while. Our orders still stand, to locate and collect any research materials left behind by the scientists. But first I need to know what's happening. Chekov, status of the neutralizers?"

The familiarity of routine reports seemed to relieve some of the uneasiness in the room. Chekov cleared his throat and stood straight. "Aye, sir. We have positioned the replacement units at equidistant points on the perimeter. They are a newer version than the previous ones. They are solar powered, and we have the ability to monitor them remotely." He held up his tricorder. "They are currently at," he frowned as he glanced at the readout, "at ninety-one percent functionality. But...they were just at one hundred percent a few minutes ago. I do not understand the rapid drop off, sir."

Galliulin nudged him. "Geomagnetics, Pavel," she said softly, and he blushed.

"Right." He dipped his head to hide the faint blush that tipped the edges of his ears. "Yes, it must be the leading edge of the incoming CME. That will of course have a detrimental effect on the performance of the neutralizers."

"Any idea how much of an effect?" McCoy asked.

The ensign looked at him, eyes wide, and shook his head. "I am sorry, sir, I do not have enough variables to calculate or even estimate."

The doctor gave him a half smile and the terrible strain in his features eased a little. "It's all right, Pavel. Whatever happens, we'll deal with it."

"Uhura. How are the comms?"

"They're functioning properly, sir. All of the diagnostics checked out fine, so someone switched everything off, and whatever happened in here was so quick that no one had a chance to power it back up and call for help."

At that, at least a few heads swiveled to take in the stained walls and furnishings in the space. Kirk tapped his fingers against the tabletop to get their attention.

"Thank you, Uhura. What did you two find out about the generator?"

"Like the comms, it was just turned off, sir. We called Mister Scott and he walked us through the start-up process. It's geothermal, and our tricorder readings suggest it's connected to a chain of volcanoes that begins about three kilometers to the north of here. Scotty thinks that with the energy they're putting out, the power reserves will be at maximum within a few hours."

"Why would it be turned off?" McCoy wondered out loud.

Kirk shrugged. "I hope we can find the answer to that, but at least we know we have a power reserve going forward. What do you have to report, Doctor? Any theories about what's going on here?"

"Well, seems pretty clear that this was a murder-suicide. There's no other explanation that I can think of. Malloy and the men could not have fought T'Mar off but she could have resisted them with only a knife and her superior physical strength."

Jim crossed his arms and tapped a finger against his chin, thinking aloud. "So then the question is why, and more specifically, is whatever caused this tragedy a potential danger to us as well? Did T'Mar have a psychotic break?

"That would be extremely unusual but not unheard of in a Vulcan," McCoy responded. "So maybe they were they infected with something, a virus, bacteria, or prion they dug up out there?" He gestured in the direction of the entrance. "Or was it something environmental that caused neurological damage? A toxin in the water that got through the filters, or a gas our biosafety monitors can't detect?"

Kirk moved to lean against the edge of the kitchen counter. "No evidence of psychological concerns in their past?" he asked.

McCoy shook his head. "No, not at all. I read through their profiles before we came down. You can't get sent out to the far reaches of the galaxy to spend a year holed up with three other people without demonstrating a considerable degree of psychological stability and resilience."

"If it's something biological, then we may have already been exposed, right?" Uhura asked. McCoy glanced at Kirk before responding, then nodded.

"Yes, that's possible. And because of that, we absolutely can't return to the ship and risk exposing others if we've been infected with something this virulent. If it's a previously unknown contagion, there's a significant danger the transporter's biofilters will not pick it up."

Rand asked the question that he knew was on everyone's mind. "Any chance it was the faulty neutralizers, sir? Did the infrasonics get to them?" Chekov glanced down at his tricorder and his lips pressed into a thin line.

The doctor almost snapped at her, " _Janice, sound waves don't get you, they don't come snatch you out of bed in the middle of the night like the boogeyman_." But he bit his tongue when he saw on her face, and a few others, genuine apprehension. He drew a deep breath.

"No," he said firmly. "Look, we all know how it works: the volcanoes produce the sound waves, when they reach us they cause oscillating pressure, and it literally makes us vibrate or resonate at the same frequency as the waves. Around here the frequency has been measuring between—" he looked down at his tricoder "—between seven and seventeen hertz. Unfortunately, that's a range that causes some problems for humans, everything from headaches to nausea, or a feeling of dread or even visual hallucinations. But it does not make you crazy, if that's what you're worried about. You're not gonna go on a murder spree because the volcanoes are a little extra rumbly."

Chekov snorted at that, and he was relieved to feel some of the tension drain from the room. Galliulin still looked unconvinced, though, and she pinned him with her gaze.

"It could be a contributing factor, no?"

He studied her—the lovely, piercing blue eyes set in a perfect oval of a face, her mouth turned down, a fine line on her forehead that no one her age should have. He wondered what she was really asking, or whether the question was even the important part of this little exchange after all. He decided to toss the conversational ball back to her.

"You're the expert on volcanoes, Irina, I can't deny that. What do you think?" His tone was mild, but he felt anger flare out from her in response and her eyes flashed.

"I think it is ridiculous that we are still down here. These people have done horrible things to each other and we do not understand why, and how do you know we are not next?" she demanded, her voice rising. "You do not know why they are dead, do you? Do you want one of us to turn into, into, that?" She pointed at the thick spray of blood from Lieutenant Malloy's carotid artery splattered across the door, her outstretched hand trembling and her chest heaving.

"Ensign." Kirk's voice was deceptively soft, and McCoy felt the undercurrent of barely-contained anger. His hand shot out to forestall the explosion he felt building.

"Hold on a minute. Pavel, where are we at now?"

His forehead crinkled with confusion, then he nodded and bent his head over the screen on his tricorder. When he met McCoy's gaze, his eyes were troubled. "Seventy-nine percent, sir."

The doctor glanced sideways at Kirk, his mouth set in a grim line. "It's gonna keep going down as long as the magnetic storms keep raging. Any of us, _all_ of us, are susceptible, and some people—maybe both of you—are unusually sensitive," he said as he pointed to Galliulin and Kirk. "It sneaks up on you. But it will not change who you are. Do you understand? We have to watch out for each other, and be patient with each other." He was speaking to all of them, but his eyes locked with Irina's and she looked away as if he had slapped her, her neck flushed and pulse throbbing in her throat.

"McCoy is right," Kirk said after a tense moment. "We are looking for something else here. So while we're tracking down their research, let's get started on potential causes as well. When we can get back in touch with the ship, I'll request any additional neutralizers in our inventory to be beamed down, or if possible, have Scotty start printing some new ones for us. Ensign," he made a half turn to face Galliulin, "where do you suggest we begin?"

With that, Kirk put the near-conflict behind them, and a flash of relief crossed her face. She chewed her lip for a moment, thinking, then nodded in the direction of the lab bench. "Winnie was the geologist here, so we should start with her. She handwrote her notes each day, and her older data would be stored electronically."

"All right. You tackle that and the rest of us will start searching for any records or notes left by the others."

"I'll help you with that." McCoy took her by the arm and guided her away from the others.

" _'Winnie_ '?" he whispered. "Did you know Malloy?"

It was a long moment before she could meet his eyes, and then it was a look of such naked anguish that he nearly shivered. "We were...close friends. Very close. Xenovolcanology, it is a small world, as they say." She attempted a faltering smile, and then turned and swiped at her face.

He tried to reflect on the last few hours as they must have looked through her eyes. "I'm so sorry, Irina. And I'm sorry you saw this." There was nothing more to say, he knew. In the background he heard Uhura and Chekov discussing how to break an encryption key, and Kirk was heading toward the first sleeping area.

"Do not be sorry. It is good to be here for her, to see her and say her name, at the end." She took a deep, shuddering breath and turned to the lab bench. "She used little black notebooks for her notes. They might be here."

He knew a diversion when he saw one, and accepted it without comment. There would be time for grief when this was over. They started on opposite sides of the room-long bench, pulling out one drawer after another, rifling through the contents as they neared each other in the middle, but coming up empty-handed.

There was a small sound of triumph from the computer workstation along the opposite wall.

"Got it!" Chekov said. "Doctor Cabrera's encryption was not difficult. Pulling his files up now…" He flipped through a series of screens, and a look of uncertainty, then disappointment appeared on his face. "Ah, they have been deleted. These are only operating system structures. And the core memory has been deliberately corrupted."

Kirk reappeared, holding a tablet, the rugged, shock proof type often used for field work. "This was in Doctor Brophy's possessions. It has biometric protections, though."

"And I think this was T'Mar's device." Uhura looked up from searching through the comms station drawers and held out a tablet similar to Brophy's but viciously smashed and splintered.

Chekov's shoulders slumped and even Kirk looked glum. "Well. All right. At least we can take Brophy's device back. I'm sure we can figure out a backdoor into it with enough time."

From the floor where Galliulin was crouched, her head in an open cabinet, there was a sound of rustling papers, then she emerged, breathless, with a handful of notebooks. As McCoy reached down to help her up, he glanced up and saw Rand standing in the doorway of the second sleeping area. She was transfixed, horror mixing with confusion across her face. McCoy sucked in a breath, his ears ringing as he pulled Irina up to her feet with more force than he'd intended.

"Shit," he muttered. "Start looking through those, okay?" he said over his shoulder to Galliulin. He reached Rand and she turned to him, eyes glassy and unfocused.

"I should have closed the door, Janice."

She swallowed and covered her face with her hands. Uhura and Kirk were there now, too.

McCoy tried to keep his eyes on the floor, putting off for a moment what he knew was unavoidable. "Uhura, can you tell everyone what this means?"

She nodded, slowly, and her voice sounded faraway. "Demon. Or vampire, devil, or maybe more like malignant spirit." She shook herself and frowned and seemed to come into focus, the linguist in her coming to the fore. "The translation is actually a little more nuanced than that, more like a spirit demon."

The doctor ventured into the space and leaned against the wall just inside the doorway. He crossed his arms, studying the words with a new, clinical eye. "You probably know more about acoustics than I do in this area—is the Vulcan reaction to infrasound typically similar to humans?"

She shook her head. "No, it's often more intense. You know Vulcans' hearing is more acute than ours, and they can sense frequencies both higher and lower than those we can. It's reasonable to conclude that they may have a more extreme reaction than we would."

"A reaction that could be mediated by their mental disciplines," he mused.

Uhura shrugged. "Yes, that's possible. Mental disciplines can only counteract physical reactions to a certain extent, though, and they may be compromised by extreme or prolonged stress."

_Well_ , he thought, _we all know about that_ , recalling the shocking altercation on the bridge between Kirk and Spock that had resulted in the unceremonious ditching of Kirk on Delta Vega.

"Bones, where are you going with this?" Kirk asked, a note of impatience creeping into his tone.

McCoy pushed away from the wall and approached the largest of the scrawled words. He reached out to trace it, finger hovering a hair's breadth away from the surface. He tried to imagine the horror and pain that must have consumed her, the cracking and collapse of mental scaffolding that could have driven her to murder her fellow scientists, methodically twist knots into that rope, and then mutilate herself before leaving one final tormented message in her own blood. A warning or a tangible manifestation of her anguish? Then she would have calculated the length of rope needed to assure her swift death, tossed it over the ceiling beam, dragged the chair over and somehow screwed up the resolve to slip it over her head and kick away the last surface she stood on. Because for some dreadful reason she could fathom no alternative.

"What if…" he said slowly, thoughts forming as he spoke, "What if T'Mar thought she saw something. Something she came to believe, under physical and mental strain, was supernatural. And it was unbearable. Maybe she felt self-annihilation was the only way to destroy it? Or maybe she felt it was destroying her, and she had no choice."

"A ghost?" Rand said, not bothering to disguise her skepticism.

"Hear me out," McCoy said, turning to face them. "Some people report seeing apparitions when exposed to infrasonics. They've been interpreted as spirits, or whatever you want to call them, maybe ghosts," he conceded. "At any rate, some kind of otherworldly figures that inspire horror and dread." He paused, dredging up the hushed stories that he'd heard as a child of the tail-end of the Appalachians, stories that had thrilled and terrified, from a place and people that defied time and where even now superstition and legend gripped the older generations. "Demons...the idea is that they possess, right? They enter you and take over?"

He looked around and saw surprise, puzzlement, curiosity, and a small knowing smile.

"Interesting theory, Doctor," Kirk said. "So you propose that T'Mar felt she had been taken over by some malevolent force and lost control over her actions? And she was compelled to murder and then self-destruct?"

"But wait a minute, you said the infrasonics couldn't make someone do something like this," Rand gestured around at the walls.

"That's right. It's not the actual cause, but maybe it was a catalyst. Or it made her more susceptible. Maybe when she thought she started seeing an e'shua, that was the last straw, so to speak, and she succumbed to the other, bigger thing that we haven't yet identified, whether it's biological or environmental or whatever."

Uhura moved to stand next to him and tilted her head with a thoughtful look at the words on the wall. "Wouldn't it be ironic, if a Vulcan ended up being the emotional linchpin of this situation. Betrayed by her physiology."

From where she sat on the floor in the lab space, Irina looked up from Winnie's notes and called across the room. "Sir, I do not think her physiology is the only thing that betrayed her—and us."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: it starts to get really dark from here. We'll have a happy-ish ending, but if you are squeamish you may want to bail out now.

"They knew this place was dangerous," Irina said. She looked up from the black notebooks, confusion and anger warring across her features. "They knew, and they still sent them here."

Kirk's eyebrows went up. " _Who_ knew?" He moved back into the main living area and began unfastening his coat and the others followed suit, unwrapping their scarves and pulling off their gloves. With the generator back on, the temperature in the space was rising rapidly.

"Fleet. Intelligence, specifically. At least, that is what Winnie came to believe in her last few days."

"Dangerous how? In what way?" Uhura asked, arms crossed as she stepped closer to Irina. "Like, there was a threat here on the planet? Or something external?"

"It is in her last few journal entries, right here," Irina pointed at a page that she held up facing outward, covered in an inky scrawl. "She wrote this in the last week before their final subspace communication. After they returned from an exploratory dig in a new region, the team began to record strange observations. Apparitions, things in their peripheral vision." She hesitated, glancing again at the writing. "Knox became paranoid and one night, convinced something was coming to kill him, he confessed a secret to her: he and T'Mar are with Intelligence, and they knew the team was there to identify and locate a newly-identified substance that Federation scientists believed would provide us with a military advantage. An unnamed ore rumored to exist in and near the volcanic regions of the planets in this area of space."

In the stunned silence that followed, Kirk leaned over her, fists clenched against his hips. "Rumored by whom?" he demanded.

"I do not know. That is the end." She held the notebook up and flipped through the remaining pages, empty of notes, then shot her hand out to catch something that fluttered out, an object in the distinctive shape of a holographic recording chip. She looked at it, and then at Kirk, a question in her eyes.

He nodded. "Let's see it, Ensign."

She moved to the lab bench and McCoy slid out of her way as she reached for the projector and held up the chip to the scanner. An error sound buzzed from the machine.

"Enter passcode," came the bland, computerized voice.

She stared at the input for a moment, a fierce frown deepening the hollows in her cheeks, then her features softened and she reached toward the input screen to tap in a series of characters. The machine thought for a moment, then beeped, and an image appeared; at first indistinct, it shimmered and shifted and then all at once resolved into a life-sized projection of a human female hovering in front of the projector.

She was smaller than McCoy expected, as he thought back to images of her in Starfleet records. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a messy plait and her smile was brilliant, brown eyes surrounded by the kind of lines that said she had laughed and loved freely and without reserve.

"Is this on?" Leaning forward, she frowned and tapped at something they could not see. "I guess it is. I'm a geologist, not a videographer." McCoy had to smile at that. "Sorry for all the cloak and daggers. Guess I'm getting a little paranoid, too." She gave a sheepish grin into the camera. "Irina, either you're watching this or my encryption skills are woefully lacking. I'm hoping this made it into your hands, whether here on Marena or packed up in my personal effects." She took a deep breath and her smile faltered.

"I've gotta be real here, Irina. I'm scared. I'm about to leave on a solo three day expedition, and this morning, as I was packing up my gear, Knox pulled me away and said he had to tell me the whole truth, in case something happened to him or me, or all of us. And I guess if you've found this and activated it, then his worries were justified."

Irina lowered her head and placed her hand against her cheek, and McCoy could not see her expression, but he could guess at the turmoil and the exposure she must be feeling, watching this intimate one-way discourse along with these colleagues she had known—with the exception of Chekov—for less than two days.

"I didn't want to write down everything that was going on though, because I don't know who to trust anymore. Here's the rest—Knox says Starfleet has an asset embedded within the Orion Syndicate. Smuggling, more specifically." She paused, as if she knew her audience would need to process her words before continuing, her cadence slow and patient.

"And the asset learned that the Orions had discovered the existence of the ore here. Not only that, the Orions have sent two prior expeditions before we arrived here, at least sixteen personnel altogether, and they lost _all_ of them to unknown causes." She stopped again, nibbling nervously on her lip, and looked to her right, then after a moment she relaxed. "Thought I heard something out there. So anyway, Fleet sent us here, knowing that no one has yet made it out of here alive, just to try to get their hands on this stuff before anyone else."

"Pause," Kirk ordered, and the image of Malloy froze, her hands mid-air and her eyes opened wide and slightly up. He needed to absorb this.

After a moment, Rand spoke up. "Since when have we had assets embedded with the Orions?"

"It's news to me, Ensign," Kirk said. "But I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. There have been isolated reports of Orion traffic in this area recently, but there was nothing suspicious about the patterns according to intelligence briefings."

"Or perhaps our intelligence briefings are obfuscating in order to deter interest in this part of space," Chekov said.

Kirk tilted his head and gave the navigator a speculative look. "Maybe. Continue," he said in the direction of the holo.

Malloy's image unfroze. "It gets worse." She looked pained. "About Knox…well, Irina, we were very close," she paused and looked away, flushed and tentative, an apology in her tone. "He's been acting very strange. He was the first to see something here in the building, you know, something that startled him, and I've never seen him so frightened. He's having strange dreams...and, and I am too," that last part came out in frightened, rushed whisper. "He's just holed up in his room now, won't talk, and only comes out to eat. But it's T'Mar I'm really worried about. She attacked Phinn two days ago and it took Knox and me to pull her off. I know our neutralizers are losing power, but that shouldn't cause this degree of impairment."

Her words had begun to tumble over each other, urgent and fervent and when she paused to breathe, for the first time a look of terror skittered across her face, deepening the creases around her mouth and revealing the weariness in her eyes. "I can't stop thinking about the Orions, and wondering what happened here, how they died. Why were we sent here? What have we unleashed? Can we get help before it's too late?" She blew her breath out all at once and turned deadly serious eyes to the camera. "If you're watching this here on Marena, please get out as quickly as you can, Irina. I'm afraid there is something evil on this planet, and it will destroy us."

The holo froze into a blurred, static image of her, then the image disappeared. The sudden silence was weighty. Chekov and Uhura looked worried. Rand was, as usual, inscrutable. Irina's head was bowed, buried in her hands. McCoy glanced at Kirk, and found the captain staring at Galliulin with an uneasy fusion of enmity and vindication.

Kirk settled into a lab stool opposite Galliulin and propped his elbows up, steepling his hands. "Ensign." When she didn't look at him, he leaned forward. " _Irina_."

At that, her head jerked up and he gave her a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"You know, when I got these orders back on Starbase Eleven, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I didn't understand why the commodore was so adamant that only you should come down here. I thought it was negligent."

She folded her hands, linking her fingers together as if to fortify herself.

"But now I realize he knew there was something classified down here and didn't want to risk any more exposure than necessary. I also couldn't figure out why you were transferred aboard my ship. You were angry, resentful." He waited a beat, then continued. "Why and how did a grieving, disgraced cadet who deserted her post get drafted back into the service with an officer's rank and a classified mission on the Fleet's flagship?"

"Those records were sealed!" She shot up from her seat, her face flushed. McCoy felt a knot in his stomach and saw the pained expressions on the others as they looked away, but knew better than to interfere.

"My crew are resourceful and well-connected," he replied. At that, Uhura shifted uneasily behind him. "But back to my question. Command knew that you had a connection with Doctor Malloy and would be most likely able to decipher her research, just like Malloy expected that you would be the one sent here. That's also why you had the exclusive authority—if you survived—to compile and return the data to Starbase Eleven. You're a puppet in a play, and so are we, and we don't even have the script. I wonder what they will do to you when you get back." There was a viciousness, a savage rage, in Kirk's voice that McCoy never heard before, and that triggered an alarm in him. Her face crumpled and she bit her lip to hold back a sob that would not be contained.

It was the control obsession again, McCoy realized with a dull resignation, and at the same time he knew it was this place, this wretched place that was inflating and driving the pain that the captain was inflicting on Galliulin, and he could stand by no longer.

"Captain." Kirk looked up at him, an alien hardness in his expression, but he plowed on, determined. "Jim, there are some medical supplies I'd like to request from the ship, if we're able to re-establish contact now."

It was a transparent redirection, and he held his breath as Kirk frowned, then after an interminable moment, rubbed his hands over his face. "Yeah, let's see where we are." The dreadful tension in the room eased and he checked the chrono on his tricorder. "They might be clear of the first wave." He flipped open his communicator. "Kirk to Enterprise. Spock, do you read me?"

Faint static greeted his transmission, followed by a painful squawking and then silence.

"Captain, the comms station here is more powerful," Uhura said, tentative. "I can try it if you'd like."

"Good idea." He did not look at her as he stepped closer to the station.

Uhura moved to the equipment and deftly ran her hands over the controls. "Enterprise, this is Marena base station. Do you read me?"

There was a squeal, and she winced, then tapped at the screen. "Enterprise, come in."

The static cleared slightly, and Spock's voice came through, distorted and laggy.

" _Interference is substantial, but we read you, Marena._ "

Kirk leaned over the equipment. "How's the ship, Spock?" He was the captain they knew again, all business and procedures.

" _We sustained somewhat more severe damage than expected to the transporters and ship's electrical systems. Mister Scott recommends that we effect repairs after the second wave of CMEs, which will arrive within sixty-two minutes."_

"Makes sense. No point in using resources that will be needed again later. I don't suppose there's any chance you have any extra infrasonic neutralizers? Or could print us up some in the next hour or so?"

There was a moment of silence before Spock responded, and they imagined him conferring with Scott before he responded.

" _Regrettably, no, sir. There are physical limitations that prohibit the replication of the devices in that time frame. However, I have been working on some revisions to the neutralizers' operation code that may enhance their performance. I will transmit them to Mister Chekov's tricorder._ "

Kirk sighed. "Thank you, Spock. We appreciate that."

" _Captain, may I inquire as to the status of the research staff?_ "

Kirk looked at the floor before replying. "They are all dead. It appears to be a murder-suicide situation."

There was a moment of silence before Spoke responded.

" _I see. That is most...regrettable_."

"Yes, we're trying to sort it out, but it seems to be more complicated than we initially anticipated. By the way, did you know T'Mar?"

The silence was so long this time that Kirk wondered if they had lost the connection. Just as he turned to Uhura with a questioning look, the Vulcan's cool voice came through. " _Yes, I was acquainted with the commander. She held a teaching position at the Academy during my tenure there._

"Any reason to have concern about her mental stability?"

" _Certainly not, Captain."_ The Vulcan somehow managed to inject a note of reproof into his dry, flat response. " _She was a Kolinahr adept_."

"Ah. All right, well I had to ask."

" _Understood, Captain. Is there anything else we can assist you with? According to my most recent projections, it may be near sunrise local time before we can re-establish contact."_

Kirk looked around at his away team, and saw only worry and weariness, and knew here was nothing Spock could do to remedy that.

"Nothing right now, Spock. Thank you."

" _Very well, Captain. You can expect some spectacular aurorae with this magnetic storm. It may be quite some time before we can repair the ship's systems and regain communication functions._ "

"Same concerns here, Spock. The next round may knock out our comms as well."

" _Acknowledged. Anything else, Captain?_ "

Kirk knew his first officer was delaying more than necessary, probing for something, anything, to assist with, but shook his head, even as he knew the Vulcan couldn't see him. "No, Spock. I think we're just going to have to ride this out as best we can. We'll get through the night and then attempt to re-establish communication in the morning."

" _Very well._ Enterprise _out._ "

Uhura flipped the transmission switch to off.

"As Spock would say, _fascinating_ ," McCoy remarked. "T'Mar? An adept, engaged in covert activities with Starfleet Intelligence? Really?"

"I don't know a whole lot about Kolinahr, just that it's supposed to make you the ultimate Vulcan, but I suppose it takes all kinds, Bones."

McCoy figured that purging all of your emotions would make a person pretty good at compartmentalization, even in their professional life, but he decided to keep that insight to himself.

"Let's try to get some rest." Kirk pushed away from the comms station with ill-concealed weariness.

"In here, Jim?" The doctor gestured around at the disarrayed surroundings and the blood splatters, and the invisible heaviness, and the captain grimaced.

"No. No, of course not. We'll have more room in the corridor. It's just as warm out there, and we'll be able to keep an eye on—" he stopped abruptly and seemed to gather his thoughts along with his coat before continuing. "Rand and Uhura, we can take first watch together. Chekov, you, Galliulin and Bones you can take over around," he consulted the chrono again, "oh three hundred local time. Tomorrow at sunup we'll head out to the dig that Malloy says started all of this, and see what we can find. Galliulin," he said as she passed him, loudly enough for all to hear. She stopped but did not look at him. "I'm sorry. What I said at the end, that was uncalled for and unprofessional."

She nodded, her face expressionless. "Apology accepted, Captain."

"Thank you."

She reached for her scarf as she disappeared through the door, and then it was just him and McCoy.

"I fucked that up, didn't I?"

"Yep, I'd say so." The doctor was not one to pull punches. "That was a masterpiece of a fuck up. I might even nominate you for the Command Fuck Up of the Year award. Maybe Nogura can hand it out at the next presentation ceremony."

Kirk laughed softly. "No need to sugarcoat it, Doctor."

McCoy clapped him on the shoulder. "I'd like to get some blood and air samples going in the lab before we shut things down. Need to start ruling out potential etiologies."

"Right. Yes, go ahead."

He drew blood samples from each member of the away team, including himself, and put the equipment in the researchers' little lab to work, coding it to isolate any potential pathogen they may have been exposed to. He tried to catch Irina's eye, to engage her as he pressed the extractor against her arm, but she was far away in a place he could not begin to imagine.

Then he pulled the door to the living quarters closed and with a silent sigh he sat down in the corridor, a single lantern turned to half power nearby. Silence settled like a blanket, the distant hum of the generator not unlike the soporific thrumming of the engines they were so used to.

Kirk and Rand leaned against the railing near the staircase, gazing through the bars down at the vast space below. Rand's stance was uneasy, her hand clamped against her hip just above her phaser. Kirk's eyes were hooded in the gloom, and occasional whispered words passed between them. McCoy spied Uhura walking further down away from them, reaching up to jiggle door handles and poking her head into any that opened. Chekov rubbed his eyes, suppressed a yawn and rolled his coat up into a lump, slid it under his head and curled up against the wall a few feet down from the doctor. Within moments, the tension in his frame eased and his breath deepened. Irina was restless, pacing and fidgeting by the head of the staircase, her body language clearly telegraphing her desire to be left alone.

Then the lambent glow of the stars through the skylight brightened and new shadows shifted across the walls. He glanced up and after a few moments found his focus slipping, mesmerized by the waves of purple and green swirling and flaming across the visible swath of night sky. _The spectacular aurorae Spock promised,_ he thought, and smiled in the half-darkness.

He did not intend to fall asleep, but he did, propped up against the wall of the corridor, eyes ensnared by the dancing sky. And then he dreamed.

These days, he saw his daughter in his dreams far more often than he saw her with him, tangible and touchable. There in his dreams, time was ephemeral and distance was meaningless. Sometimes she was an infant again, and he was in the little space they had carved out for her in their first house as he sat in a squeaky old rocking chair in those suspended hours before dawn, listening to a soothing rain and watching her finally settle against him; as her tiny, dimpled hands stilled and her eyes flitted beneath her nearly translucent eyelids. He had wondered what babies could possibly dream about.

Other times she was older, in what Jocelyn had called the "terrible twos", but that he had secretly relished. _She's stubborn. So strong-willed_ , his ex-wife had complained with a mixture of exasperation and brittle impatience, and he asked himself if that was when he had begun to realize that it might not work out. _She's persistent. Determined_ , he'd counter, and she would roll her eyes and stalk away, throwing words over her shoulder. _Fine, you deal with it._ Not _her_ , but _it_. _You're never here for the worst of it anyway._ She wielded guilt like a switchblade.

Then she was starting school, and the terror and dread on her face that she tried to hide for him melted away at the sight of the brightly decorated classroom and the smile on her teacher's face. Her hand that had clung tightly to his slipped out, and he was the one who had to fight back tears as he walked back down the hallway.

Those dreams sustained him, kept the desperate regrets and recriminations at bay in between the occasional vidcall or, when Jocelyn was feeling unusually generous, a scan of a hard copy letter in Joanna's careful, sloping print.

But this night, as he slid into REM sleep and the netherspace that awaited him there, something was different. Joanna was there, but not the Joanna he remembered and expected: blue eyes shining bright like cornflowers with wonder at fireworks; squealing with laughter at being tossed into the air at a cousin's birthday party; sniffling over a playground tiff with a friend; or the shock on her face when she took a tumble at the beach and snapped the bones in her forearm and he had rushed her to the hospital and babbled far too long at the intake nurse before she understood.

No, _this_ Joanna was huddled in a dark corner in his dream, eyes huge with terror at the sight of him, blood pouring out of a gaping wound in her chest—gods, more blood than a child could survive, he knew—shrieking at him so loudly he tried to cover his ears with his hands but couldn't because he was holding a blade that was dripping onto him—

He wrenched his way out of the horror with a wail that, when he awakened, was only a whimper that died in his throat. Scrambling to sit up straight, he screwed his eyes shut and pressed the palms of his hands flat against the floor and gulped air until his ears stopped ringing. He thought he might throw up.

" _Jesus Christ_ ," he rasped out for only him to hear, and his voice broke, and with gritted teeth he swallowed down the roiling in his gut. _Not real not real not real_ was the mantra he let play on repeat in his head until he could time out a deep, steady breath.

After a moment, when he felt the cool of the floor seep into his hands and judged that he was truly awake and not in one of those horrid reality-bending nesting doll dreams that sometimes hounded him, he opened his eyes.

From the corner of his vision he glimpsed a shadow he didn't remember from earlier, but when he turned to look, it shifted away. Since he had settled down here and looked up at the skylight—that now felt so long ago—the captain and Rand had vanished and Uhura was sitting cross-legged a little ways down the hall, frowning at something she was studying in her lap. He could not see Irina nearby. Chekov was where he had fallen asleep, the dark curls on his head just peeking over a fold in his makeshift pillow.

Above, the aurorae churned across the sky, no longer pleasing and calm, but with silent, fiery fury, casting a sickly yellow glow through the skylights. The chrono on his tricorder told him it would be another five hours before the sun began to rise above the horizon here. The emotional residue of his nightmare clung to him like an invisible coating of slime and his mouth was dry from the adrenaline that had coursed through him.

He was rummaging in his supplies for a bottle of water when a shift in Chekov's breath snagged his attention. He leaned forward and peered at the ensign's face, watching his eyelids flutter in the dim light, and he wondered what kind of night time exploits the ensign's brain had conjured up for him in this cursed place. When Chekov's hands twitched and a strangled moan escaped from him, McCoy guessed it wasn't a pleasant adventure. He slid over to face him, pulled his knees up and leaned back, then tamped down the temptation to reach out and shake Chekov awake.

When the ensign's eyes flew open and his breath heaved like a drowning man, McCoy was prepared for confusion and disorientation, and was ready to reach out with a reassuring hand. He was _not_ prepared, though, for the strangled roar that came out of Chekov's throat, or for time to slow to a crawl, or for the kicking and flailing arms, or for the younger man to crack the back of his head against the wall behind him.

At that, McCoy caught a glimpse of Chekov's eyes in the glow from the skylight and knew that it had been no accident, nor a reflexive startle out of a nightmare, and he had just enough time to slip his hand behind Chekov's head before he slammed it backward once again. The doctor noted, in this silent and slowed space, that the rock this wall was formed out of was not smooth; it was an amalgamation of pebbles, stones of different colors, large and medium and small, some coarse and ashen with uneven textures, some glittery and keen-edged, and this time he heard the crunch of his bones, and then there was numbness.

Then time sputtered back and a throbbing flared across his knuckles.

" _Fucking hell_ ," he gasped, and grabbed at Chekov, scrabbling one-handed to yank him away from the wall. Uhura appeared beside them, book dangling from one hand, a look of shock frozen on her face. For just a moment, Chekov's ragged breath was the only sound. Then the book dropped from Uhura's grip with a muted _thud_.

When McCoy trusted himself to speak, he rasped, "Slow and deep breaths," and he wasn't sure if the command was meant only for Chekov. Then, "Uhura, bring that light over here. And my medkit, too," and jerked his chin toward his supplies. His uninjured hand was still clutched around the front of Chekov's tunic, pinning him in place. Uhura lifted the lamp, then crouched beside him and held it up. Chekov squinted and dipped his head.

McCoy swallowed against the desert in his mouth. "Look at me, Pavel," he commanded.

When the ensign tilted his head up and McCoy searched deep into his blue eyes for the mania, the agony, the feral _otherness_ he had glimpsed a moment earlier, he did not find it. Pupils normal and equal? _Check._ Good focus? _Check_. No obviously lurking alien demons? _Check._ He fought back a shiver of hysterical laughter and cleared his throat.

"You gonna do that again?"

Pavel was looking at something in the distance, his eyes wide open, but he shook his head.

"Can I let go of you now?"

Chekov nodded and McCoy released his grip on him. He brought his injured hand into the lamplight and saw for the first time the blood smeared on his palm, and the scraped and bleeding skin on the other side, and his already-swelling digits. Registering this all at once, he reached his left hand forward to touch the back of Chekov's head, fingers coming away sticky, then reached crosswise to unlatch his medkit and pluck out his scanner. It warbled as it fed data to his tricorder, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

"No skull fracture. Lean forward so I can take a look at it." He squinted in the uneven light and probed around the edges of the wound. Chekov yelped. "I know, sorry. Just an abrasion. Scalp injuries bleed like a motherfucker, but this one's not too bad. You'll be all right, Pavel." He fumbled with the supplies in the kit, trying to pull out packets and containers, and finally with a snort of frustration he thrust it toward Uhura. "Helluva time to be right handed. You've had advanced first aid, right? Can you hand me some gauze and then tape up my hand?"

Uhura gave him a small smile and a folded square of gauze, and he motioned for Chekov to lean forward, then pressed it against the wound on the back of the ensign's head.

"Must have been a doozy of a nightmare you had there, kiddo," he said quietly.

Chekov's eyes crinkled in confusion at the doctor's anachronism, then he nodded, inferring the doctor's meaning. "Aye." His voice was gravelly and thin. "It was, sir. I am so very sorry about your hand. I do not understand what happened." His mouth drew into a grimace and tears pooled in his eyes.

It was not in McCoy's nature to dilly dally over an unpleasant discussion— _strike while the iron is hot_ , _Leonard,_ his mentor had said more than once before he had finally and mercifully blundered out of his ill-fated end-stage psych residency—but the more prudent side of him decided that this was neither the time nor the place for a dream analysis.

"Hold this right there," he instructed, taking Chekov's hand and placing it on the dressing. "Keep pressure on it." Sometime around the third year of medical school he had learned that distraction was an effective remedy for distress. He returned his attention to his other hand, now under Uhura's well meaning but fumbling attention.

"No, loop it under my thumb and around my wrist—" Uhura stopped what she was doing and gave him a thin-lipped stare.

"Sorry," he said. "That's great. Just a little tighter. Please," he added, for good measure. "Where's Galliulin?"

"I saw her go downstairs a few minutes after Kirk and Rand," Uhura said. "They were going to check the generator, make sure its backup batteries are charging properly," she added, then, "What do you think is going on here?" as she smoothed the last piece of tape against his thumb and began gathering up supplies to return them to the medkit.

"Not sure." He tried to flex his fingers, found them bound tightly, and gave a single nod of satisfaction. "But we need to keep an eye on each other. Probably just the weakening of the neutralizers. I'm gonna go downstairs and check in with the captain."

"I will go with you, Doctor," Chekov said, and rose unsteadily to his feet. McCoy checked the dressing the ensign held in place, removed it, then gave Uhura a long stare. The lieutenant chewed at her lip and he realized with some surprise that even she was spooked.

"Wanna tag along?"

She gave him a wan smile. "Sure, why not?"

"Hold on." Before she fastened the latches on his medkit, he reached in for a hypospray, then selected a few purple vials and slipped it all into his side pocket.

 _This blasted staircase is becoming tedious_ , McCoy thought as they descended. When they finally reached the bottom—he counted this time and it was one hundred and twenty two human-sized steps—he was well and thoroughly tired of stairs. It was darker down here, the light from the aurorae not filtering down quite this far, but he spotted the bright glow of a Fleet-issued lantern about halfway to the great doorway at the entrance. He looked over his shoulder to be sure Chekov and Uhura were still with him, then made his way toward the light.

Kirk looked up at their approach, Rand just to the side of him, her hands clasped behind her back. They were deep in conversation and as he neared, McCoy was suddenly struck as if he had walked right into an intangible current between the two, like a fly blundering into a spiderweb, and he wondered how he had not noticed before now. Looking from one to the other, he could not be certain either one of them were fully aware either, though there was an uneasiness to the bend of Kirk's shoulder that he had come to recognize. Of course, it was verboten: a captain could not pursue a subordinate officer, nor vice versa. And besides, Kirk would swear up one side and down the other that despite his long and illustrious history of romantic dalliances, the _Enterprise_ was his one and only lady.

But for now, they were two officers holding watch on an away mission, and as they approached, McCoy nodded at the captain.

"Couldn't sleep?" Kirk asked with a half smile. Rand took a step away from him, but if the captain noticed he did not react. Then Kirk's smile faded as he took in their appearance: McCoy's inexpertly bandaged hand and Chekov's bleak, wan expression. "What happened to you two?" he demanded. "We heard some noise up there." The two of them exchanged awkward glances and the doctor stepped forward.

"Chekov and I got startled out of some bad dreams," and at this, Chekov could not help swiveling his head sharply in McCoy's direction, for this was the first he had heard of McCoy's nightmare. "He banged his head and I scraped up my hand. I thought a change of scenery might do us some good, and Uhura came along to keep us in line. Where's Galliulin, by the way?"

Kirk's face went blank and his jaw tightened, as it sometimes did when he was surprised with unexpected information. His communicator chirped as he flipped it open. "Kirk to Galliulin." There was no response and he snapped it shut. "I thought she was upstairs with you." He turned to Rand, mouth open to issue an order, but the ensign was already consulting her tricorder.

"It's difficult to tell if there are other human life signs nearby. I'm not picking her up immediately."

" _If?_ " Kirk said. "There should definitely be one more human life sign around here."

Rand blushed and averted her gaze at his sharp tone. _And this_ , McCoy thought, not for the first time, _is why we have fraternization rules_.

"I'm sorry, sir," she continued, more composed now. "There is interference from the CME, making it difficult to discriminate between individual readings."

Kirk nodded in the other direction, avoiding her eye contact. "Understood, Ensign." He glanced at his tricorder chrono. "We can't afford to lose track of anyone. Rand, you and the doctor and Chekov start searching for her down here. Uhura, you're with me. We'll take the second floor."

Uhura nodded and the three of them watched as she and Kirk ascended the stairs and disappeared into the shadows.

"If we split up, we'll cover the floor more quickly," Rand said, turning to the great hall on their right.

McCoy's mouth quirked up. "You've never watched a horror holo, have you, Janice?" She gave him a withering look.

"Never mind. Yeah, we should split up. You two want to take that way?" He gestured in the direction she was facing.

"Well, if he's injured, I think you should stay with him."

He had to admit she had a point. "All right, then. Chekov and I will take this direction. Watch out for creepy clowns and giant seed pods." As she walked away she said something he didn't quite catch, but her tone was clear.

"Pavel, where are the neutralizers at?"

"Down to forty-seven percent, sir." The vertical lines between his eyes betrayed his anxiety.

 _Well, that's just dandy._ McCoy groaned inwardly. "All right. Well, let's do some sightseeing and hope we find your gal, Ensign. Oh, don't look at me like that; it's as plain as a pig on a sofa."

Chekov blushed to the roots of his hair. "She is...it is complicated, sir."

"It always is, Pavel." The doctor sighed and tapped the switch on his lantern. "It always is."


	6. Chapter 6

Sometimes Rand wondered how she had ended up in Security. Well, of course she knew _how_. It was the _why_ that she sometimes wasn't sure about. When the recruiter in that stuffy, cramped office on the outskirts of her decaying desert hometown sat her down in front of a computer and called up the Starfleet career aptitude test, she had been full of anticipation and excitement. Would it be engineering, and a life of keeping a great starship running? Maybe navigation and a coveted slot on the bridge? Or a career in medicine, curing disease and saving lives?

When she answered the final question of the test and the results popped up, she could not hide her disappointment. _Security?_ she thought. _Like, military police?_ Janice was not a fan of law enforcement and its inherent authoritarianism; her interactions with the legal system over the years…well, to say they had not been positive would be an understatement. The old-fashioned wooden chair scraped against the floor as she stood up.

The recruiter saw the expression on her face and jumped in before she could backtrack her spur of the moment decision to step into his office. _Security is the most important role in the Fleet_ , he'd said. _A division with a long and exciting history. Your mission will be to protect and safeguard the Federation from internal and external threats. With your scores, you'll be a shoe-in for the Academy, straight into the officer track. You could be on a first contact team, or assigned to top secret diplomatic events, or even work alongside Intelligence agents._

She wavered, her eyes flicking first to the door, then at the faded posters on the wall, once glossy, edges curling with age now. _Starfleet Needs YOU. Want Adventure? Join STARFLEET._

 _Do I_ have _to work in Security?_ she'd asked. _It's just a recommendation, right?_ _Can't I sign up for something else?_

He appeared to consider her request, letting her stew in anxiety for a moment before responding. _Well, if you want, I can add you to the waitlist for another field,_ he said, holding up a cautioning finger as her face brightened, _but it may be years before there is an opening. If you choose Security, you can leave on the next transport from Albuquerque. Ten days from now. And like I said, you'll get prioritized for the Academy._ A look of calculated regret came over his features. Like any natural born salesperson, he had read his mark the moment she stepped in, and knew exactly which buttons to push. _Of course, I'm only here in the office twice a year, so if you need to take some time to think it over, maybe talk to your family..."_

She stared out the window of the office. There was a row of six shops across the street, half of them closed and in disrepair, emptied of all but the shelves and display counters; the other half decorated with desperately colorful advertisements that had not drawn in customers in recent memory. Just beyond loomed the shuttered and rusting aviation manufacturing facility, its operations long ago moved to a location closer to White Sands.

Further down the street were a couple of bars, quiet now in the middle of the day; the comprehensive school she'd recently graduated from, staffed with teachers who she suspected were unable to secure assignments in a more respectable location; and the main office of the sole remaining employer in town, the solar and wind farm. A kilometer or so in the other direction was the graveyard of a copper mine that had closed down more than a hundred years ago, the land still bearing the scars where that metal had been gouged from it. Otherwise, as far as she could see in every direction, there was flat, brown, sun-baked terrain stretching until it met the bluest of blue sky at the horizon.

She thought about staying for now, and her options for forging out a better life. Maybe she could take classes at the vocational school the next town over and earn the credentials to pull herself up into a job in sales on an up-and-coming colony planet; or tech support on one of those remote outsourcing settlements, telling users to turn their computers on and off again all day. A vision of herself, seated in an endless warehouse of cubicles under flickering lights, bathroom breaks monitored and timed, popped into her head.

Or she could shoulder the backbreaking work of her family's hardscrabble desert farming business, as was clearly expected of her. Living out the rest of her life at 725 State Road 005, doing exactly what her parents and grandparents and those before them had done...trapped in the ramshackle house that had no locks on the doors, where no love was untainted, and where so many memories haunted her. A sourness shot up from her gut and flooded her mouth.

The recruiter waited, sensing the distasteful calculus playing out in her head. Then she nodded and he smiled.

" _Okay. Do I need to sign something?_ "

Now she was here, having not only survived but flourished at the Academy, and then earning her first posting—on the flagship, nonetheless—and some days, after having time to become comfortable enough to reflect upon her position, she fantasized about ditching the red shirt and re-training for something a little more challenging. Maybe administrative services or project management. She could be a...what was it called back in the old military? _Aide-de-camp_. Yes, she would be happy doing that, she thought. Deputy to an admiral, on a base or a colony; or even at HQ eventually. Maybe she could start as Kirk's assistant, his yeoman...re-training would sideline her for a year or two, and she'd have to get Kirk to sign-off, but some days she thought it might be worth it.

This was one of those days.

 _Enough_. She pushed the fantasies away, then turned up the luminosity on her lantern and adjusted the beam to its widest. An enormous stone archway loomed above, marking the transition from the great main atrium into the wing of the building that she had offered to explore. She couldn't imagine why Galliulin would be down here, but as a security guard it wasn't her job to think too much about her orders; that was another long-simmering resentment of hers. It was pitch black here outside of the circle of her lantern, as dark as the desert on a moonless night. But at least in the desert there were stars and the great glowing band of the Milky Way to orient and reassure.

She halted just past the arch. "Galliulin? Are you here? We were supposed to stick together, so the captain is a little pissed off that you disappeared." To her disgust, her voice sounded small and timid, and she raised her lantern higher.

"Irina?" She was more forceful this time, but there was no response, no indication that any living thing inhabited this space. Her boots tapped against the stone walkway, but otherwise the silence was oppressive and she began to feel that her shoulders were aching beneath an invisible weight.

Janice didn't frighten easily. Living in one of the most hot and arid areas of North America could be dangerous, and she had learned early that survival depended on staying calm and level-headed even in life threatening situations. Once in Starfleet, her years of training, countless simulations, grueling field exercises and actual experience had turned the alarming into the mundane.

But this place, this planet, had put her on edge, reluctant as she was to admit it. The rational part of her brain told her it was the infrasonics that McCoy wouldn't stop yammering on about. She secretly adored McCoy like a grumpy old uncle who would give you candy when no one was looking, but his earlier pep talk about the effects of the sound waves had done little to quell the undercurrent of creeping fear and anxiety that had coursed through her since they arrived here. She didn't notice when her hand went to her side and touched the handle of her phaser.

A few steps further and her lantern revealed that the space in this wing was divided into two: one corridor that veered off to her right was lined with closed doorways that stretched as far as she could see, until they faded into the darkness beyond. She bit back a surprised expletive when she turned to her left: there was a vast open space filled with hulking, shapeless forms and she held her breath, rooted in place, until she saw that they were still and lifeless. Determined to rout out her cowardice, she decided to start with that path, and as she approached the closest object, its details began to resolve. The objects were a lighter color than the night, almost glowing, scattered among the shadows. She held her light up as far as she could reach.

" _Oh_ ," she breathed. It was a figure carved from stone, a statue in the likeness of what she assumed were the long-vanished inhabitants of this planet. The head was beyond even the furthest reaches of her lantern, but the features she could make out were intricately detailed and skillfully rendered. The stone was fine-grained and bluish gray, highly polished, of a different type than that used to construct the building. If it was representative and true to scale, these people had been every bit as massive as they had speculated.

She stepped forward to the next closest figure, this one smaller. Perhaps it was meant to be a child, she thought. Nearby was what appeared to be a seating area, benches with ornate carvings, a carving like a tree or spreading shrub, and she wondered if this had been what humans would call a museum or a memorial.

Then a shiver of fear blind-sided her, almost causing her to drop her lantern. Her breath shallowed and before she could gulp in a breath, another wave slammed up against her, this time making her lightheaded and shaky. _Stop it, Janice_ , she scolded herself. _Pull yourself together. It's just what McCoy talked about, just physics playing with our emotions._ She had a fleeting urge to pull out her communicator and call Chekov, to hear another voice, then dismissed it just as quickly.

But as she forced herself forward into the space, feet growing heavier, tendrils of dread began crawling up her spine. A surge of adrenaline pounded into her ears, and she was all at once certain that someone or something was watching her. She stopped short and drew her phaser.

"Irina?" she whispered, and was dismayed at the tremor in her voice. In the ringing silence, there was a shifting in the shadows to her right. She spun and lowered herself into a crouch, and without thinking she flicked the phaser's safety off. A form emerged, running toward her, indistinct and silent, only the whisper of footsteps against the stone floor. She caught the unmistakable flash of a blade, and she fired.

* * *

Sometimes Pavel wondered how he had ended up on the bridge of the _Enterprise_ ; well, not really _how_ , but definitely _why_. Before Nero arrived he was just a lonesome, awkward, precocious kid from the back country of Russia with a tedious accent, a genius-level aptitude for math, and a hunger for adventure. Sometimes, alone at night, drifting off to sleep, he wondered what his life may have been like in another reality, what stories Ambassador Spock could have shared had he been willing.

Yet here he was now in this time, navigator of the Federation flagship, the jewel of the Fleet. He often tortured himself with the thought that his elevation to command track on the bridge was in large part due to the decimation of the cadet class back in '58 and that the Ambassador's memories would have cast Pavel Chekov in a very different role. Transporter tech perhaps, or security guard.

In this moment, though, as he and Doctor McCoy ventured into the wing of the building they were searching, he wondered more specifically about how the universe had contrived to have him not only on the _Enterprise_ , but also assigned to the same impromptu away team as Irina Galliulin, his first love and biggest regret. Chance and randomness were unfortunate inevitabilities of the universe, but he could not convince himself that these circumstances were without design.

When the dust had settled after Nero's attack and the _Enterprise_ crew had returned to San Francisco for a period of leave, as soon as he had a spare moment he sprinted over to her Academy dorm to search for her. She had been left behind on Earth, unassigned to the fleet of doomed ships sent to Vulcan but on standby should the need for additional crew arise because—like his captain—she was on probation, hers stemming from a mess hall prank against a particularly ill-tempered cadet first class.

In the dorm he had found only a single residence advisor wandering the halls of the building, in something of a daze, who informed him that Irina had disappeared after learning her sister had been on Vulcan attending an astrobiology conference during the attack, and was now considered AWOL. He'd searched the city for days, trudging up and down the hills, through the business district and along the wharf, hoping to catch a glimpse of her impish smile or her hand resting against her hip in the way he knew so well. But he never found her.

A few months later, having set up a bot to alert him of any civilian or Fleet news including her name, he learned she had left the service with a dishonorable discharge, and then she vanished from the 'nets.

So her arrival on the _Enterprise_ was completely unexpected and, he deduced from their initial encounter, not a welcome experience for her. After the surprise of seeing her in the corridor outside sick bay, he had entertained hopeful scenarios over the course of his shift on the bridge, then methodically crushed them one by one, reminding himself of her disappearance from the city—and his life—without explanation or farewell.

It was a shock then, yesterday morning, as he was gathering his supplies for the away mission to Marena, when she pressed the entry chime to his cabin. What followed was still confusing and fresh and vivid in his mind: how she murmured an apology, took the lukewarm cup of coffee from his hands and placed it carefully on the side table in his sitting area, and leaned in for a tentative kiss, her breath fluttering and warm against his neck; then, as time seemed to slow, the gentle caresses, his hands remembering anew what she had taught him; followed by frantic groping and fumbling and the delicious hunger coiling tight inside him as she nudged him with her knee backwards toward his bed; her hands clutching at the sheets, the urgent, pleading noises coming from her throat—then it was all cut short by the captain's voice over the announcement system, ordering them to the transporter room.

In the here and now on Marena, he stifled a desperate groan of frustration.

"You okay, Pavel?" McCoy stopped and put his bandaged hand out toward him. "You're a little flushed again. Do you feel warm?"

He sucked in a deep, shuddery breath before responding. "I am fine, sir." _Stop it. Pull yourself together, Pavel._

McCoy gave him an appraising stare, eyes narrowed. "You need to tell me if you start having trouble with your vision, or a headache, or anything unusual, all right?"

He nodded and fell in beside the doctor. McCoy turned the lantern to the brightest setting and Pavel looked up as they passed beneath the enormous archway that divided the great atrium from the left wing of the building that they would be exploring. _Looking for Irina, more specifically,_ he reminded himself. He couldn't imagine why she would be down here and, distracted, he stumbled over a stone that jutted up in the walkway. Something flashed in his peripheral vision that wasn't there when he whipped his head around, and his anxiety about her disappearance, coupled with the perseverating horror of his nightmare, suddenly spiraled up from his gut in a maelstrom of dread and despair. He stopped and bent over, hands braced against his knees as he was struck with a wave of bile in his throat and unable to contain the choking sound that escaped him.

" _Pizdec!"_

McCoy swung the lantern toward him and for the second time in the last hour he scrunched his eyes shut against the light.

"That is the twenty-five thousand lumens setting, sir," he croaked, and McCoy cursed and fumbled with the controls. The light dimmed considerably and Chekov risked opening one eye.

"Sorry about that," the doctor said in a conciliatory tone. He stepped closer and lifted Chekov's chin, and he was flooded with the feeling that McCoy sometimes evoked, that of being a rare insect pinned to a display board.

"Sit," McCoy ordered.

Pavel murmured his assent and slid to the floor, knowing his wobbly legs would not support him much longer, then leaned back against an ornate metal partition that divided the main walkway from a sitting area. The doctor settled in next to him, muttering crossly when his injured hand came down with more force than he'd expected. Where they sat, they were facing the entrance of one of the smaller rooms along the wing, and could see rows of shelving just inside, filled with dusty bound tomes with different colored covers and covered with unfamiliar symbols, some with pages loose and askew. It had been something of a surprise for member worlds of the Federation, as they spread out and explored strange new worlds and new civilizations, to find that book binding was a rather common practice across the part of the galaxy they called home. The long lost inhabitants of Marena were, it seemed, no exception.

"You wanna tell me what's going on, son? Besides the weirdness we're all feeling down here, I mean?" The doctor rested his elbows on his knees, hands dangling, and closed his eyes against the sting of weariness.

Pavel passed his hand over his face to conceal his grimace, and counted to thirty before responding. "It is Irina," he said finally. "We were close, once."

McCoy grunted. "Yeah, so I gathered." He was quiet for a moment before continuing. "And then she disappeared."

Pavel didn't bother asking how the doctor knew that; it was rumored that the man had spies all over the ship.

"And here you are, looking for her again."

He nodded miserably.

"This have anything to do with the dream you had up there? Must have been something pretty frightening," the doctor said with a mixture of gentleness and paternalism, a compound that he took care to dispense judiciously. He had a reputation to maintain, after all.

Pavel blinked and swallowed against the lump in his throat, feeling a sudden release inside of him, then trying and failing to steady his voice as his words tumbled out. "I've—I've never had a dream like that before. It felt so real. It was terrible. And Irina was in it, and—" he broke off and buried his face in his hands, fingers raked through his curls, and rocked back and forth. McCoy found this far more alarming than the head-banging after his nightmare, and took the time to choose his next words with care.

"You did something terrible in the dream."

"Yes."

"To Irina."

"Yes." The word came out in a tortured whisper, the confession a relief, and a sob wrenched out from deep inside of him. He gasped for breath, his throat tight and aching and tears blurring his vision.

McCoy sat next to him, still and silent. He breathed and listened, took in the confusion and regret and hurt that rolled off of Pavel, and when the tempest began to ease and the anguish bled away, he placed his hand on Chekov's shoulder, hoping to any higher powers out there that he was not making things worse.

"Pavel, I know it was terrible. But dreams are just how our brains take out the trash, and we've had to deal with a lot of trash here in a very short time. We can have horrible dreams without being a horrible person. Just like wishing someone would die doesn't make you a murderer."

A choking sound came from Chekov. "But I cannot get it out of my head! I keep seeing it over and over again." He wiped his sleeve across his face.

He was heartened at the flash of anger in the ensign's voice. "Yeah, I think there's something else going on here," he said, "like Malloy's recording said, and I don't think it's an infection or something toxic." He groped his way through it, trying out the words as he spoke them. "It's like something's put a signal booster on our emotions. Does it feel like to you, Pavel, that everything is amplified here? Like you don't just feel angry about something, but you feel enraged? Or not just frightened, but terrified?"

The look on Chekov's upturned face was the only answer he needed, and the doctor sat back, relieved but uneasy. He drummed his uninjured fingers against the floor. "Our amygdalas have been hijacked," he murmured.

"Sir?"

McCoy shook his head as if to clear it. "Never mind." He looked closely at him, scanned his face with no small measure of concern. "You all right now? Feel like you're up to this?"

Chekov looked back with new steadiness in his eyes. "Aye, sir. I will not leave her behind again." He hesitated. "If I may ask, sir, you said you dreamed too. Was it also unusual?"

McCoy grunted and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, as if he could grind away the images that still jabbed against the edge of his consciousness, greedy and tenacious, like vultures circling a dying animal.

"It was...disturbing." He dredged up a crooked smile and pushed himself up with one arm, then offered a hand up to Chekov. "Come on, let's go find her. We'll need to clear all of the rooms." He gestured toward the one in front of them, with the books. "Let's start there."

They were a few steps inside when from a distance there was a scream and then a shriek of pain.

When Chekov reflected on the next few moments later, he could remember only that the archway, the great atrium and staircase, and stonework, and another archway were blurs as they ran past; the lantern in McCoy's hand was bouncing, casting wild shadows ahead of them; and the awful silence was broken only by their footfalls and his gasping breath.

McCoy sorted out Rand's location and reached her first. She stood a few meters into a smaller area filled with looming figures he could not immediately make out and he skidded to a stop, frozen until he realized they were not alive. To his right, Rand's lantern had fallen to her side, and the light tilted up against one side of the room. When he moved in closer, he saw that the figures were statues of humanoid shapes, large trees carved of a glossy granite-like substance, and benches cast in a grainy stone aggregate.

"Janice?" the doctor said, taking in her terrible, rigid stillness. "Are you all right?"

But he knew she was not, and that it might be some time before she was all right again. A wide-eyed look of shock was fixed across her face. He stepped closer to her, reached down and tipped the lantern upright, and something lying on the floor just outside of the circle of light caught his eye and set off an alarm in the back of his head. One step nearer, and the source of his foreboding was revealed: Irina, sprawled on her back, her eyes fixed on the far away ceiling, lifeless. He knelt next to her and pressed his fingers against her neck anyway, and as he expected, felt no pulse.

Something moved behind him, partially blocking the light. He turned and saw Chekov staring down at Irina, confusion and disbelief and distress converging across his features.

"What—what is wrong with her?" He looked at McCoy, dazed, and his voice faltered. "Can you help her?"

McCoy pushed himself up and reached out for him, and he backed away as understanding washed over him and he shook his head. "No. No no no no no." He pressed his hands against his face as if he could crush the realization away.

The doctor touched his arm, but he stumbled away, and anyway, Rand was his more immediate concern. She stood as motionless as one of the statues that surrounded them, her breath ragged. Her phaser was still in her hand, pointed down, finger straight and off the trigger as she had been taught, her knuckles white around the handgrip. He heard hurried footsteps approaching, two sets of them, one lighter than the other.

"What's going on?" Kirk demanded as they emerged from the darkness, out of breath. McCoy didn't take his eyes from Rand and waved him and Uhura away, wanting to hold just the two of them inside this conversation.

"Janice, you don't need the phaser anymore." He downshifted his cadence, slowed his words, and held out open palms. Over time and with great patience, he had coaxed out the parts of her history that she had stricken from her records, as was sometimes allowed. Dreadful secrets were locked up in the JANICE RAND file in his mental library, and knew that for her a suggestion would yield a far better outcome than a demand.

She finally looked at him, _really_ looked at him, and her eyes were too bright, her mouth in a rictus of a half-formed scream before she blinked and shook her head as if to clear it. He edged toward her. "It's okay, Janice," he said gently. "It's over now. You can put it down."

She gave a tiny shake of her head. "No. I—" her lungs filled and a sob exploded from deep inside her. She glanced at where Irina's body lay and her face crumpled. "I don't know—I don't remember. I didn't mean to do that." Her voice was pleading and tremulous and childlike, and the disquiet in his gut grew.

"I know," he soothed. "I know you didn't mean to. Would it be okay if I came a little closer?" He wasn't sure, from her distant stare, if she even heard him.

"I'm sorry. I...I don't want to do this anymore." She straightened and met his eyes, the anguish on her face softening into relief and resolve.

"All right," he replied, unsure of what she was referring to, but fearing the worst. "Okay, we can talk about that. I can help you with that."

He held out his hands again, held his breath as she wavered, then she raised the phaser, her finger slid to the trigger, and several things happened all at once: he lunged forward to knock the phaser from her hand before she could finish aiming it at her head, for he knew without a doubt that was her target; Chekov sprung out of the shadows from his left and tackled Rand, screaming incoherently and brandishing a knife; and from behind him, Kirk drew his own phaser and pointed it at the nearest statue, exploding it and sending shards of rock showering down upon them. The noise and dust of the tumbling structure startled Chekov and he glanced up, giving Kirk an opening to wade into the brawl.

"Chekov! Stop it!" Kirk grabbed his arm, and then had to dodge as the ensign gave a snarl of rage and turned the knife on him. He feinted to his left, glanced at Rand, motionless on the floor, saw a pool of darker red spreading across her tunic, and in that split second space of time he heard a familiar hiss, and then a look of surprise on Chekov's face before his eyes fluttered shut and he collapsed against Kirk.

There was a moment of shocked, still silence, then the captain wrestled Chekov's inert body off of him and placed him carefully on the floor and looked up at McCoy. The knife slipped from Pavel's grip with a dull _clank_ against the stone floor. The doctor was breathing heavily, hypo in his bandaged hand, and smoothed his other hand over the front of his tunic, as if to confirm he was still there and in one piece.

"You bring one of those with you everywhere, Bones?"

"I do since I met you," the doctor retorted, battling the blinding panic in his head, and collected himself, then looked down at Chekov. "He'll be out for a while." He knelt next to Rand. "Uhura," he beckoned her out of the shadows, where she had been standing and watching as if fixed in place, "can you run upstairs and grab my medkit and another lantern?"

She was gone before he finished speaking, and McCoy wrestled his tunic over his head, leaving just his black undershirt, then folded it into a small square and pressed it against the wound in Rand's shoulder. She moaned and tried to push him away, but she was weakened by pain and shock and her hands fell limply to the floor. He leaned his head near hers and murmured something to her that Kirk couldn't hear, and she relaxed against the doctor.

"Will she be all right?"

"Yeah, I think so," McCoy replied tersely. "It's deep. I can patch her up, but we'll need to get her to the ship sooner rather than later. I recommend we skip the trip to the dig site and get out while the gettin's good."

Kirk stood in place for a moment and took in the scene around him, tried to absorb and process the turmoil of the last few moments. "What the hell happened here, Bones? Why did Rand—? Why was she trying to—?" His voice rose with each question, but he didn't finish his thoughts, aware that the ensign was still conscious. "Why did Chekov attack her?"

McCoy didn't look at him and didn't respond for a moment as he wrapped his fingers against Rand's wrist. "How long until we have contact with the ship?" he said finally.

"Spock thought it would be some time after sunrise. That's about—" he consulted his tricorder, "about four hours. Answer my question, Doctor." There was an iciness in his tone that McCoy chose to ignore.

"I would guess that whatever happened to the researchers and the Orions before them is also happening to us."

"And what is that?" Kirk demanded, and McCoy shot him a look of frustration. He adjusted Rand's impromptu bandage, then stood and moved closer to Kirk, close enough that the captain could see the flash of fury in his eyes and hear the growl in his voice.

"I don't know! How the fuck am I supposed to keep us from killing each other and find a miracle cure at the same time?" he whispered furiously. "And what the fuck have _you_ been doing since we got here? Other than trying to get a piece of Rand's ass? Pike was right about you, you know? You may _never_ be ready for this."

There was venom in his tone, and in the startled silence that followed, he had time to take in the anguish in Kirk's eyes, then hold his breath and brace himself when the captain's fist shot up and toward his chin. But the punch never landed; Kirk's fist hung there, suspended, his arm trembling, for a moment before he allowed it to drop to his side.

McCoy blinked, stepped back, and rubbed the nape of his neck. "I'm sorry, Captain," he said hoarsely. He closed his eyes, trying to push away the pressure that throbbed there. Shame surged through him, leaving him dizzy at the thought of Jim's grief, of a father lost twice. "That was...you shoulda decked me. I deserved it."

"It's all right, Bones," Kirk said after a moment.

McCoy let his breath out with a count to ten. "Why don't we try that again?" He gestured upward in the general direction of the living quarters. "I'll have results on the blood work and air samples in an hour or so, but my gut tells me we're not dealing with something biological or environmental."

"What other possibilities are there? Ghosts? _Demons_? Should we perform an exorcism?" Kirk tried, with little success, to dampen the sarcasm in his tone.

McCoy snorted. "There will be no exorcisms on _my_ watch, sir," and the smile that quirked at the corner of the captain's mouth diffused the lingering tension. "We haven't detected any sign of other life forms here, Jim. It could be something unlike anything we've encountered. Our instruments may not know how to detect it."

Uhura burst back into the space, a sheen of sweat on her forehead, his medkit and a lantern tucked under her arm. "Here you go."

He took it from her and popped it open. "Thank you, and congratulations, Lieutenant. You were such a fine assistant earlier that I'm promoting you to field medic." He returned to Rand's side and Uhura crouched beside him. "Hand me the scissors, that blue hypo vial, and the portable steri-field unit. No, not that, the thing just to the left. I'll need the protoplaser, too."

"Anything I can do?" Kirk asked.

McCoy was cutting away at Rand's tunic and didn't bother looking up. "Last thing I need is a ham-handed ship's captain. Give me a little while for this." He slid the vial into the hypo and pushed it against her neck. "This'll help with the pain, Janice."

Kirk knew a dismissal when he heard it, and figured he deserved this one. He glanced at Chekov, spread-eagled where he lay, his face peaceful as if he were sleeping deeply. He retrieved the blade, recognizing it as the one they had seen upstairs, lying by T'Mar, and reasoned Irina had lifted it when no one was looking and brought it down here with her.

Then he moved to Galliulin and crouched beside her. He reached out, cupped his hand against her cheek, feeling that her skin was already cooling, and sighed. He knew she had no living relatives, no one to whom he could write a letter of condolence, no one to mourn her, no one to remember her besides the crew who had served briefly alongside her. He thought, for neither the first nor last time, of the long-ranging pain Nero had wrought, and then carefully brushed his hand over her eyelids, closing them for the last time.

Then he stood and drew a deep breath, hooked his fingers under the handle of the lantern next to her, and decided to explore this space.


	7. Chapter 7

It didn't know how long it had been here. It had a distant, vague remembrance of being _not_ here, of coming alive lost in coldness, weakened and crazed by its craving, then traversing the galaxy, through silence and stars for time unknown before being drawn to this place. A place that was also achingly cold above, yet not far below was tunneled through with vast, countless chambers filled with glowing magma and delicious heat. It slipped into a fracture in the earth, and that heat was enough to satiate it, for a while; it gorged on it then dozed, lurking in the crevices and reservoirs, occasionally sending out tendrils of itself to explore, searching always for new cavities of the energy that sustained it.

When the heat began to ebb, it awoke in fits, vibrating with hunger and the fierce, mindless need of it. It drifted, sluggish, through its system of underground pools of heat and shafts, until it found the source and the cause of its fading food supply, an enormous, volatile pool of magma. After slinking through a series of narrowing pipes, as invisible as the river of heated air it drifted upon, it was disgorged into a kind of place that was altogether new to it. It sensed that it was above its habitat now, on the surface of the planet. The heat from its home was spewing out all around it, wasted, lost and unconsumed.

But it was there that it also discovered an entirely different kind of energy, tiny pockets of energy that were much more potent, and that seemed to exist in endless quantities, in constant motion on the surface. With some experimentation and practice, it found it could slip into these discrete, glowing entities, and by doing so, drain the energy and transfer it to itself. It decided that this was a far more pleasurable experience than suckling at the viscous fluid emanating from the rock of this planet.

Only by chance, it learned that if it pushed itself into an entity in a certain way, it could catalyze the conversion of its energy enough to cause it to also destroy other nearby entities for its consumption. This chain reaction was more efficient, but as it became more skillful, eventually its gluttony begat recklessness, and it inadvertently touched off an energy event that in short order snuffed out every one of them on the planet. Upon consuming such a large meal at once, it was too dazed and engorged to ponder the consequences of this accident as it slithered back to its caverns.

There it slept, but after an unknown passage of time, when it detected the presence of new entities near the great opening that spewed ash and fire into the air, it roused itself and bellowed at its hunger. It moved upward, then merged with the lava that poured down so it could observe them, unseen and unseeable. These were different, and intriguing. With its first taste it found that that they were even more combustible than the previous entities, and they were soon harvested. Another group appeared, and it consumed them as well after noting with interest that increased energy eruptions from the ground amplified the intensity of their energy.

When yet another group descended upon the flank of the dome it considered its lair, it decided to delay its feeding, and instead lurked along behind the entities as they returned, to its surprise, the same inside place from which it had first emerged ages ago. It did not know how long it would be before it would be able to hunt again, so it toyed with these, sliding itself in and out of them, sipping at them, pushing at them again and again in the way that made them flare up and burn brightly until it withdrew, sated for a time. This time, it discovered that for some of them, its prodding produced greater spikes in energy if done when the dark sky was ribboned with energy it could not reach. Then it tired of these as they began to dim, and it finished them off.

To its delight and wonder, no sooner than it had sucked out the last whisp from them than more came along, and this time—now adept at regulating its feeding cycle—it was ready to amuse itself. These entities were full of bright, clean, vibrant energy; yet like all the others, they had shadows that flickered dark and volatile, that it knew could be exploited for energy gains. It had already consumed the one that it identified as the most easily ignited, then encountered unexpected resistance in others. But it had all of the time in the universe, and had developed the ability to lie in wait and observe. After a while, it sent out tiny coils, probing at the three closest to it with a barely-restrained shiver of desire.

* * *

Kirk had never been an enthusiastic student of art. He was a natural when it came to graffiti, but that was the extent of his hands-on experience with media and substrate, if spray paint and the underside of the Old Man's Creek bridge counted.

Nevertheless, he was driven by a relentless need to learn and understand the universe around him, and that by default included the visual arts. Years go, McCoy had asked him about this need, and he'd shot back that if the doctor was a whiz kid genius, he'd understand. He knew, but hadn't yet got around to contemplating, that the doctor's sour expression was trying to tell him that there was something more complicated behind his near-compulsion.

So he could expound at length on Paleolithic versus Holocene cave paintings, the differences between Etruscan and early Greek sculpture, the evolution of Chinese ink painting, and the historical implications of the Neo-Vulcan period in Earth's late twenty-first century. He could recite the thirty-seven dynasties of Gorn heraldic crests and provide an example of most of them. He could date the era of an Andorian chest and identify the three subtypes of Antican war masks.

He could not, however, dredge up one iota of interest in those topics beyond the satisfaction reaped from knowing that he knew more about them than anyone else in his circle.

This reflection and the resulting insight was prodding uncomfortably at the edge of his awareness when he passed the last of the statuary and moved into a smaller gallery. When he stopped and held his torch up to the first wall mural he encountered, then the second and the third, he began to suspect that this art and his understanding of it was going to be very different than any he had previously encountered.

* * *

"This doesn't make sense," McCoy muttered. His tricorder beeped at him from where it lay on the floor, next to Rand's shoulder, as he ran his scanner over her. She had drifted into unconsciousness for no discernible reason. He reached over without looking, muted the alarms and peered at the imaging of her wound. "Not perfect, but good enough for now with what we have, and there's no internal bleeding. It's like something's draining her...Uhura, will you—"

"No."

He looked up and blinked at her.

* * *

It was a little confusing at first, but after examining three of the murals, Jim realized that they were, from his perspective, in reverse order. He figured that if this civilization possessed the same linear concept of time as most humanoids, then the first in the series must be at the opposite end of the gallery.

So he skipped, for now, the intervening ten paintings and strode toward the other end, torch guiding his path, and started over at the beginning. And as he reflected upon the first, taking in the technique, the subject, the composition, he came to the bleak realization that all of his book learning about symbolism, intention, context, bias—all of the points upon which he could prattle on about at great length if called upon—was irrelevant here. It was plain to him that these works were meant to be a literal illustration of events that the creator knew may not be easily transmitted via other means. That they had known if someone else came along after their terror was over, pictures might be the most effective way to tell their story and to warn off others. This gallery was at once a history of their lived experience and a cautionary tale. He now saw the things that he and his crew had experienced since their arrival through a new lens.

"Fuck," he muttered, and swung his torch around, then ran as quickly as his feet would take him.

* * *

McCoy had come to expect exceptional equanimity from Uhura. After all, it was a defining characteristic of a comms officer, even written into the soft skills job expectations, though it was of course done up in the typically turgid bureaucratic language of Starfleet personnel. _Ability to prioritize multiple competing requests from various command levels, maintain composure in stressful or life-threatening situations, delegate tasks to junior officers as necessary, adapt communication style and manner as needed and appropriate,_ etc. etc.

He had watched her develop all of that, and much more, since their first meeting. Looking back, it was ridiculous that Kirk had introduced the two of them upon exiting that shuttle ride from the Riverside Shipyard as if she and Jim were already life-long bosom buddies, but they had connected right then and there in the Academy shuttle bay, shouting hellos over the noisy blowback of cooling engines. It was only ever platonic; she had even then been somehow, inexplicably, ensnared by Spock's cool distance; and he, having just escaped the Fulton County Courthouse with not much more than the clothes on his back, had no interest in romantic entanglements, so it was a friendship of no pressure and no expectations. At first, he was charmed by the agility of her mind, and she was intrigued by his veneer of studied cynicism, but their affection and mutual respect had deepened over the years into a fondness that went far beyond the professional.

He almost didn't recognize her now, as she stood there in the shadows, hands on her hips, her expression cold.

"No," she spat out. "You've been ordering me around since we got here, like I'm one of your fawning peons in sick bay, and I've had enough."

He could handle hostility, hatred, indifference, pity, disgust, and almost any other emotion that had been hurled at him over the years. But what he felt radiating from Uhura was contempt, the one emotion that had loomed large and on display for all in that courtroom years ago, and that could still flood him with self-loathing. He dropped his scanner and pushed up to stand and face her. This close, she had to crane her neck to meet his eyes.

"You think you're too good for this? Did you forget that I know where you're from? And what you've done?" The words came out of his mouth unintended, and he watched in disbelief as his hands pushed her backwards. She stumbled and caught her footing, but he was larger and far stronger and suddenly she was backed up against the wall, pinned by his hands on her shoulders and a knee between her legs. He was panting, sweat collecting at the nape of his neck, and even while a distant voice in the back of his head was shrieking at him to stop, he felt a jolt like electricity slam into him and cut off all but the blaring, throbbing need to crush and consume.

"I outrank you, remember?" he growled. "I can order you to scuttle around doing whatever I want." He saw with horror that one of his hands had drifted from her shoulder of its own volition and was closing around her long, slender neck.

She gasped and tried to pull away when his fingers slid up to her jawline and tightened there, then she stilled and gave him a defiant glare that was mixed with something he had never seen and never wanted to see from her. "What do you want me to do?" she hissed. "Or do you want to do something _to_ me?"

He watched her color darken as his fingers found her carotid arteries and squeezed. One part of his brain observed that evolution had left the human body with far too many fragilities, while another part filled his vision with the blinding, pulsing need that had taken control of him. His face was inches from hers, and he shuddered in despair as he inhaled the fear that oozed from her pores.

"Do it. Do it," she begged, trembling under him. " _Do it._ You know I want it." Her breath took on a wheezing sound and her eyes filled with tears that would not fall. She grabbed his other hand and clenched it against her stomach, her nails biting into his palm, and pulled him against her. His thumb slid up and the black spots in her vision cleared, but at the look in his eyes—eyes that were dark and foreign—her tears finally coursed down her cheeks and she heard herself choke out a final word.

" _Please_."

The pounding of boots on stone slabs was at first only a distant distraction from the events unfolding between them, then the noise became unavoidable. When it stopped abruptly, there was a split second of shocked silence, then a shout.

"Bones!"

Something tore away in his head with a rage and agony that left him sucking at air, and then he saw his hand around her neck and her hand around his, and he splayed his fingers out, shaking her off, and backed away. His vision tunneled and he felt himself crumpling down, and was grateful that there was a wall close by to lean into when his arms went windmilling out.

"Uhura, are you all right?" He heard that as from far away, his ears still ringing, muffled, but he recognized Jim's voice.

Then hands gripped his arms. "I guess it liked the first bite of you so much that it came back for seconds."

He was still trying to puzzle through that when the hands yanked upwards and he found himself standing, unsteady, but upright again. He put out a hand, groping for the support of the wall, then dared to look and saw Jim in front of him, eyes anxious, darting from him and Uhura. She was several steps to his right, but seemed a universe away, her arms crossed around her, bent over and making a desperate whimpering sound that made his heart hurt and his toes curl up in his boots.

Kirk swallowed and closed his eyes for a minute, then looked at McCoy with a gaze the doctor could not ignore. "Okay. Okay. We're okay."

_Are we?_ McCoy wondered, but the captain continued, resolute.

"You need to come with me and see something." He tugged at McCoy's arm. "Both of you."

The doctor took a step forward automatically, then was struck with a memory of duty. "I can't leave her," he said, gesturing toward Rand. "She's...something's wrong. And Chekov, he could wake up any minute."

"If you don't see this, it won't matter, Bones. Come on, showing you will be faster than trying to explain. Bring a lantern."

* * *

McCoy wasn't in the mood for an art exhibit, but when he switched the lantern on and lit up the gallery like daytime, he could understand the captain's urgency. He had to step back to take in the scale of the series of more than a dozen murals, stretching from floor to nearly the ceiling. He was no critic, but could recognize that the artist had brought a strong aesthetic sense and careful technique even to these minimalist works.

Starting at the beginning, the first few depicted what he assumed were glimpses of an ordinary day in the life of the previous inhabitants of this planet: building, playing, working, learning. The figures in the paintings had a benevolence about them, a dreamy contentment.

Then came a focus on the volcanic regions of the planet and a nearly blueprint-like map of some sort of mechanical system. The next painting seemed to portray the emergence of an indistinct fog emerging from that system.

"That looks like the underground generator complex," Uhura said, her voice hoarse.

The remaining paintings traced out a progression of events, from a gradual madness overtaking their populace; then outbreaks of violence in many forms, from rioting to murder; and finally a planet-wide war with weapons of mass destruction. It was clear that the paintings had been completed in haste; particularly near the end, the artist had dispensed with any unnecessary or ornamental elements. The final piece was unfinished, a container of paint tipped over underneath, its contents long dried in a small puddle.

"Do you see it?" Kirk asked, his hushed voice echoing in the chamber.

McCoy stepped closer to the third painting. "They tapped into something when they built their geothermal systems? Or awakened it?"

"I think it's a record of what happened, but also a warning for anyone else who might end up here," Kirk said. "I think T'Mar figured it out and tried to stop it by shutting down the generator because she knew the volcanoes were the source, and she switched off the comms thinking that if they couldn't call for help, maybe no one would come here, and the violence would end."

"The failing neutralizers made us more vulnerable. And of course Starfleet would investigate. She wasn't thinking clearly."

"Obviously. What could do something like this? Is it sentient?"

"How could it be, if it's non-corporeal?" Uhura said, her voice stronger now. "We haven't seen anything or picked up anything on our instruments, so it must be invisible or nearly so, like that." She pointed at the gaseous cloud-like shape in the generator painting.

"But it's not _entirely_ invisible, is it? I can't be the only one who's been seeing things out of the corner of my eye this whole time?" McCoy asked, eyebrows raised, and there was a moment of awkward silence that told him all he needed to know.

Jim cleared his throat. "Whatever it is, it hasn't gone away. Not as long as it has something to infiltrate."

"A creature without form, that feeds on horror and fear, and that must assume a physical shape to kill. How do we beat something we can't see?"

"We don't have to _beat_ it, Bones, we just have to outlast it. Isn't it odd, though, that none of us have felt...you know...especially murderous for a little while?"

They looked around at each other, McCoy and Uhura glancing away quickly. The captain's lips thinned and he glanced toward the entrance to the gallery. "Let's get back to the others. We should be able to contact the ship in a few hours. We just have to watch out for each other."

McCoy saw his chance and seized at the possibility. "I've got some stuff that would tranquilize an active volcano, Jim. I could knock all of us out, or at least make us very happy until Spock comes looking for us. I suspect the creature wouldn't be able to cause any harm if we can't feel anger or fear."

Kirk was quiet, and the doctor thought he might be considering it, then the captain stopped and spun around to face them. " _Lights out!_ " he whispered. He and Uhura extinguished their lantern and torch. They stood silently in the dark, halfway across the statuary garden, waiting for an indication of whatever had caused Kirk to halt. McCoy could hear the faintest rasp of Uhura's breath and caught himself from reaching out to touch her.

Then they heard what had caught the edge of Kirk's hearing. A distant scraping sound, followed by a louder, prolonged squeal of metal against stone. It was a sound they had all heard just the previous day, though it seemed now to be eons ago. It was the smaller, rusty-hinged door at the main entrance of the structure. There was a muffled exchange between at least two different voices, but it was not the familiar intonation and flow of Standard or any other language typically spoken on a Federation starship. Above the occasional guttural utterance came a sibilance that caused Uhura to lean toward Kirk.

"Orions," she murmured into the air between them. He reached behind himself, groping into the darkness until he touched McCoy's shoulder and found Uhura's wrist.

"Stay here," he whispered, and gripped his hands around them tightly in warning. He felt for his phaser and drew it, flicking the safety off, then crept toward the archway that separated the great statues from the center atrium, where he could still hear the voices. As he approached, their tone became increasingly strident, if he could assume that human vocal characteristics also applied to Orions. He reached the edge of the archway and leaned into a shadowy alcove to peered out.

Closer to him was an Orion male, bald, his skin a sickly green glow in the torch that was strapped to his upper arm. He was flanked by a female who held a hand weapon trained on another female they were slowly circling, who was snarling and brandishing a wicked looking blade as they drove her toward the empty fountain. The male drew a disruptor from inside his tunic and shouted in rage when it failed to fire. Panting, sweat streaming down his face, he dropped the disruptor and reached for a long object strapped at his hip, what appeared to be an ice axe, and Kirk screwed his eyes shut as he swung it at the opposing female with a roar. When the shrieks faded and he dared opened his eyes again, he tried not to look at the remains splattered along the floor. Before he could process what was happening, the second female let out a screech of rage and drew from her hip a whip on the male.

He tensed when he heard something behind him and turned, phaser raised, then realized it was McCoy, holding Rand in his arms.

"We could hear it, too," he breathed. "Thought we should strike while the iron is hot—if we can sneak past them and get outside, we may be able to hide until the ship is back in range."

Kirk nodded, then realized the doctor could not see him. "Right. I'll get Chekov. We'll have to come back for Galliulin."

When Kirk returned, Chekov still lolling unconscious in his arms, the female was backing the male up against the staircase, growling and snapping the whip at him. They crept into the atrium, hugging the wall, but the male caught sight of them as he reached the head of the stairs and he shouted in their direction. The female jerked her head around and bared her teeth at them, then her eyes widened in surprise as the male reached down and twisted her neck with a snap that echoed across the atrium. From the top of the staircase, he stared first at her body, then at their small group, as they inched their way to the door. His gaze followed them but he made no move to attack. McCoy wondered briefly if the Orions had succumbed so quickly to the effects of the creature due to their pheromones. Confusion and fear flickered across the alien's face, and he looked down at the blood splattered across his tunic with horror. The doctor hesitated just before Uhura reached out toward the door.

"Jim—"

"Bones, I know, but—"

A howl from above cut the captain off and they turned as one to watch as the Orion's body slammed into the stone floor with a sickening thud.

McCoy sighed and muttered a curse under his breath, and nodded at Kirk. "All right, then, let's go." He snagged a coat from the entryway hooks where the scientists had hung theirs, and Uhura grabbed as many as she could carry on the way out.

The aurora had retreated into a few feeble, flickering fingers stretching up from the horizon. Stars glittered and blinked in the inky sky. The crunch of their boots into the icy crust and their breath, harsh in the brutal cold, were the only sounds.

"We need to put these on," McCoy jerked his head to indicate the coats in Uhura's arms, "then find a hollow or somewhere out of the wind as much as possible." His jaw was already clenched against the chattering that threatened. The captain didn't respond, his eyes narrowed into the distance. "Jim, did you hear me?"

"Or," Kirk said slowly, "we could abscond with an Orion shuttlecraft."

"What?" McCoy squinted against the darkness in the direction Kirk was looking. "Are you hallucinating again, Jim? Didn't they beam down here?"

Uhura laughed softly, ignoring McCoy. "Yes, I see it, too, Captain. First thing that's gone right down here."

McCoy still couldn't make out what they were talking about, but he trudged along in their wake, and as they drew closer to the far end of the pathway cut into the ice that led to the building's entrance, an object gradually resolved into a vaguely shuttle-shaped shape. Its dull gray hull gleamed in the starlight, and a dim yellowish light glowed from within. McCoy thought it was quite possibly the most lovely shuttlecraft he had ever seen.

"Think you can fly that thing?"

Kirk looked over his shoulder, the old familiar cocky look in his eyes, but Uhura spoke up first.

"Why would they leave the lights on?" she whispered, suddenly wary, as she shrugged her arms into a coat that was far too large for her.

Realization dawned in the captain's eyes, but before he could respond, a fourth Orion, another male, appeared from the aft of the shuttlecraft. He trudged through the snow in large, flat boots, eyes downcast and muttering indistinctly to himself. Kirk spied what appeared to be a phaser rifle slung across his back. He looked down at Chekov in his arms, and Rand in McCoy's, and realized they were the proverbial fish in a barrel. He motioned them backwards into the shadows. He drew his phaser and saw with dismay that the power indicator was blinking, indicating that it was out of power.

"If we're lucky," he murmured, "his phaser's drained just like ours."

McCoy gave him an almost-feral grin, just visible in the murky, pre-dawn light that tinged the far horizon just a shade lighter of purple. "Distract him," he said, and knelt to carefully place Rand on the snow. He covered her with the coat he carried, hoping that the adrenaline he expected to shortly begin coursing through him would make him oblivious to the cold.

Kirk stared at him. He was unaccustomed to the doctor volunteering for potentially hazardous duty.

"Do it!" McCoy hissed.

The captain placed Chekov on the ground and the young man moaned, his eyelids fluttering. They froze as Kirk peered around the bank of snow, then breathed out in relief when he gave an all clear signal—the Orion was still oblivious to their presence. He gestured at Uhura to join him, and she stepped past McCoy without a glance.

"Hey! You!" Her voice rang out in the blanketed stillness. The doctor slid into the darkness in the opposite direction, disappearing behind the shuttle as the Orion's head jerked up in surprise. Uhura strode toward the craft, Kirk close behind, and smiled at the frozen shock on the Orion's face. He reached for the phaser rifle strapped across his back and fumbled with the cord that held it in place, giving Kirk the split second he needed to land a palm heel strike on the man's nose. It was a glancing blow, just enough to stun him until McCoy could do whatever it was he planned to do. The Orion roared, more insulted than injured, and Kirk was about to open his mouth to call out for McCoy when the doctor appeared behind the alien and jammed a hypo into his neck with a force that made Kirk wince. He slumped against the shuttle and slid down, his coat sliding up behind him as his eyes fluttered shut.

"Never carry your weapon on your back," Kirk said, looking down at him. "That's a rookie mistake." The Orion snarled, but it was weak, and his hand slid down to rest at his side and twitched there.

"I'm glad I had Tova pack extras," McCoy said to no one in particular, then leaned against the hull of the shuttle, his knees suddenly weak from exhaustion and a myriad other things that would need working through. "Can we get the hell out of here now, Captain?"


	8. Chapter 8

_Captain's personal log, stardate_ _2261.111_

_We're on our way home. Not for long, just enough time to take care of some engineering and systems upgrades that Scotty's insisting on. We'll also return the personal effects and remains of the Marena scientists to their next of kin, or, in Ensign Galliuilin's case, to Starfeet for disposition._

_The crew will have a couple weeks of leave, with the exception of Ensigns Rand and Chekov, who will both be spending some time at Starfleet Medical at Doctor McCoy's recommendation. I have been assured that Rand will not face a court martial for the death of Galliulin, and she has requested reassignment to a Starfleet training facility when she is cleared for return to duty. I concur that a new assignment would be advisable._

_Meanwhile, I've requested a meeting with Admiral Nogura, which has been granted. I am not looking forward to it._

_Also, I still have a wedding to officiate day after tomorrow. Note: verify all waivers have been signed in the presence of a witness and a legal representative, and that no recording devices will be allowed._

* * *

It was a typical springtime morning in San Francisco—sunny, a little brisk this early in the day, a breeze that tickled and, with a playful gust, threatened to upend McCoy's cap. He clamped his hand down on his head until it abated. He felt slightly ridiculous in this get-up, but Jim had insisted that you couldn't just walk into Nogura's office in your everyday uniform—" _It's the big man himself, Bones."_ So here he was, in dress uniform, all spit and polish, feeling like his neck was in a sling, and waiting for Captain James Kirk, who had invited him along for this little adventure. He squinted against the morning light, searching for Kirk's familiar, jaunty gait among the throngs of people crossing the plaza in front of Headquarters. A faint waft of sea salt overlaid with the sweet, minty fragrance of eucalyptus teased by, and he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.

"Hey."

His eyes flew open as he jumped a step back, then scowled at the man who had appeared next to him. "Don't do that, Jim."

The captain's eyebrows lifted and he tilted his head at McCoy. "You're twitchy today."

The doctor flicked his hand at him in dismissal, then sighed. "Yeah, I guess so," he admitted. "Long day already."

Kirk steered him toward the entrance. "You get Rand settled in?"

"Yeah." He didn't want to talk about it, but Kirk was being either oblivious or stubborn. McCoy figured it was even money on which.

"How is she? What about Chekov?"

"Later, Jim," he replied shortly, and nodded at a passing commodore followed by her frazzled-looking yeoman scurrying along under a pile of printed reports. This was neither the time nor place to have a consultation about a crew member's mental health….or lack thereof, in this case.

At his tone, Kirk held up a hand. "Got it." He reached the entrance first and stepped, without breaking his stride, into the revolving door. McCoy made for the swing door to the side—the revolving ones always gave him an unpleasant moment of claustrophobia—and they emerged at the same time into the Headquarters lobby. He removed his cover and raked his fingers through his hair to smooth it, then looked around. He hadn't been here in a while, but he couldn't see any significant changes.

Unlike the fortress they had recently been marooned in, however briefly, this was an open, airy space, white columns and windows everywhere; not inviting, exactly, but alive with people and voices and movement. He stood a little ways behind Kirk as the captain spoke with the security guard behind the reception desk, soaking in the feeling of being on a planet that felt, smelled, and looked like home.

"C'mon. Eightieth floor."

As they waited for a lift to arrive, Kirk tapped his right foot against the floor, and rolled his shoulders as if to loosen them.

" _Now_ who's twitchy?" McCoy muttered in his direction.

"I don't exactly have a great track record of meeting up with admirals here, Bones."

He was taken aback at Jim's clipped tone, then realized he should have foreseen this. This is the space where Kirk had first been unceremoniously relieved of command by Pike; then had stumbled into smoke-filled chaos to find Spock next to the admiral, and had pressed his fingers into the man's neck in futile search of a pulse.

The story of that night, which began with a reconciliation between the demoted captain and the admiral in a dive bar, had come out in bits and pieces when McCoy could catch the man unawares, rare moments when his defenses were lowered. The early halting, flat-affect, time-warped retelling of the trauma was almost unbearable, but he knew that the memories must be excised and then stitched together into a story that would someday make sense to Kirk, or at least in a way that he could live with. But after all this time, he was not at all convinced that Jim would ever move far beyond the primal, pre-narrative space where Pike's death loomed in his captain's head.

"I know. You're fine, Jim." He meant it to ease the tension, but Kirk rubbed at his forehead where McCoy knew his headaches always started.

"Am I?" The words were nearly inaudible and the doctor wasn't even certain they were intended for him. The lift came to a stop.

They took the long way around— _it's a nice view of the bay this way_ , Jim said, but he noticed they conveniently avoided passing by the big conference room—before ending up in front of a nondescript Starfleet-issue gray door which slid open as they reached its motion sensor.

The admiral's aide glanced up from her desk. From her eyes, he guessed she was Betazoid, and felt Kirk stiffen next to him.

"Good morning, Captain. Lieutenant Commander," she nodded at them in turn and then blinked at Kirk, assessing him coolly. "Captain, your concern is unfounded. The admiral would not ask that of me. Please be seated. I will advise him that you have arrived."

McCoy stole a look at Kirk, who, to his astonishment, was blushing. No sooner had they made their way to a pair of chairs and settled in, than the door to the inner office opened. Nogura appeared and they had to stand back up, Kirk fumbling as he almost dropped his cap. The admiral had a reputation for keeping his subordinates on their toes, so to speak, and McCoy supposed that--along with having a Betazoid aide--this game of musical chairs was just a tactic meant to keep people discombobulated.

"Please, come in and sit. James, it is good to see you again," the admiral smiled and extended his hand, and Kirk took it. "Doctor," he said, turning to McCoy, "I do not believe we have met."

"No, sir, we have not." The man was small in stature but radiated a formidable aura of confidence and authority.

"I am pleased to meet you. Doctor Seifert has had only positive things to say about you."

Well, _that_ was unnerving. He shot a glance at Kirk, but the captain was occupied with trying to adjust the chair Nogura had directed him towards. It was a little low to the floor for him.

"I'll be sure to thank her for the kind words the next time I see her." He saw the man's eyes narrow, then the admiral smiled and lowered himself into his seat behind his desk. It took up half of the width of the room, and was made of a gleaming exotic wood, a vast surface with only a monitor set at an angle that faced away from the guest chairs. He clasped his hands together atop the desk and fastened his unreadable eyes on Kirk. "What can I help you with, James?"

Not _What did you wish to see me about_ , or _What do we need to discuss,_ but _How do you need me to help you?_ McCoy was beginning to understand why this man was disliked to the far reaches of the Alpha quadrant, his name uttered more often than not in conjunction with a derogatory epithet.

Jim gave up on the chair and leaned forward, trying not to slouch. "Sir, I have some questions about our recent mission to Marena—"

"The K''am Khangolia system? Your official report was, shall we say, notably sparse."

If the interruption was meant to distract Kirk, it did not work. "Yes, sir," he continued. "I have concerns about the history of our involvement in the system and the orders I received. Three Starfleet personnel and two civilians perished there, and I'm losing another ensign due to injuries she suffered."

"Yes, I heard about Rand," the admiral replied absently. "But the history of our involvement, Captain, is none of your concern." His voice hardened. "Furthermore, I hold _you_ responsible for the injuries to your crew. Galliulin went of her own volition, but there should have been no other casualties. Your orders were to send her down alone. Under no circumstances, even if she did not survive, were you to allow any of your crew down there."

There were at least four different things McCoy wanted to say all at once, but he held his tongue. Uppermost in his mind was the palpable frustration and confusion roiling off of Jim; he also worried about the Betazoid in the next room and what kind of mental fortitude she had to possess, to sit there and take the tidal waves of emotion that this man must provoke from his guests all day long.

When Kirk spoke, it was with the deadly dangerous tone he'd heard only rarely from his captain, teetering just on the edge of insubordination. "I accept that I am not owed an explanation for our involvement in whatever disgraceful activities occurred there. But—" he held up a finger as Nogura's eyes darkened in irritation, "You are responsible for ordering that young woman to her death. You knew what had happened there, how many Orions died, and that there was some unidentified, lethal force there."

At the mention of Orions, Nogura stood abruptly and his chair made a scratching sound against the floor. "I am ordering you to never speak of this matter again, Captain Kirk. That goes for you, too, Doctor," he focused his stare upon McCoy, "and all of your crew who have knowledge of the Orion involvement." His voice rose and he jabbed his finger in Kirk's direction. "The entire system has been placed under quarantine and this event will never appear in official records. This is an intelligence matter and lives are at stake. Do you understand?" He stared at them in turn, gaze furious.

"You mean _more_ lives?" the doctor said softly. Nogura's gaze latched onto him and he had a sudden, ridiculous image of an enormous squid, its tentacles entwined in the sails and stays of an old wooden warship. _You've unleashed it now, McCoy_ , he thought.

"What is your point, Doctor? The past cannot be undone." The admiral's eyes had turned cold and distant.

"My point is, Admiral, sir, that Irina Galliulin did not go willingly to her death. You know that, and to state otherwise is to misrepresent her character and to falsify the record," the doctor said mildly.

"Bones," Kirk murmured, but McCoy ignored him.

"She was there by your order, because of you and your reverse activation clause."

"My—" the admiral frowned at him, nonplussed, momentarily distracted from his rage. It was, McCoy thought, possibly the first genuine emotion he had sensed from the man. "Reverse activation clause...I don't know what you're talking about, McCoy. Galliulin and that other geologist—"

"Malloy. Lieutenant Winifred Malloy," McCoy said.

"Yes, yes, Malloy, she and Galliulin were...well, they were involved at some point. Personally." He said the word with distaste. "She came to me and begged to be sent to Marena. Said she knew they had gone silent and she would know how to interpret Malloy's research, would bring it all back if I just let her go and find out what happened. Although," he continued with a thoughtful expression, "I can see the utility of such a clause."

_Great_ , McCoy thought. _That's gonna come back to bite me in the ass. I can feel it._ Also _, what the fuck? None of this makes sense._

He could see anger and resignation warring across Kirk's features. Apparently Nogura did as well, for he sat back down with an air of victory and hooked his thumb into the cuff of his jacket to wipe away at an imaginary smudge on his desktop. He gave Kirk an expectant look. "Anything else I can help you with, Captain?"

Kirk stood and stepped forward, then leaned against the desk, palms flat against the surface. "I want her service record expunged."

"What? Whose record?" But Nogura's eyes slid away to the vista of sailboats and sunlight sparkling off of water, and Kirk sensed an opening.

"You know what I'm talking about. I want Galliulin's academic probation and desertion removed, and I want her discharge changed to honorable."

Nogura laughed. It was, McCoy thought with disgust, a sound as dry and empty as he supposed the man's soul to be.

"Why? What does it mean to you, Kirk? She has no family, no next of kin. Her body will be cremated, her name put on that memorial on the plaza with all the thousands of others, and no one will ever care what kind of discharge she had."

McCoy had had enough of this petty little man. He stood as well, tucking his cap under his arm. "Admiral, next of kin is not the same as family. I don't know what sad excuse you must have had for a family when you were growing up, but our crew is our family, even if we are only allowed a few days with them. So no, Ensign Galliulin will not be forgotten, and there are plenty of us who will continue to visit that memorial at every opportunity, and we will honor her."

The admiral's eyes bulged and a vein in his neck began to throb. It occurred to McCoy that he may have gone too far. The man had to be pushing eighty, and he wondered with a flash of anxiety if he might still be on his first heart.

"You're dismissed. Get out. _Now_."

"Yes, sir." Kirk dragged his hands away from the desktop and McCoy noted the handprints left behind with satisfaction. No doubt the aide would be in here with cleaning supplies before they got back to the lift.

"Why are all the admirals assholes?" He said after the door slid shut behind them. "Well, except for Pike," he amended.

"We've lost a lot of talent over the last few years, remember? Those who stayed behind, well, that's who we're left to deal with." But Kirk wouldn't look at him, and McCoy knew that his words are too flippant.

"Nah, that's not it. That was personal. What'd you do?" he prodded, thinking of all the opportunities Kirk had had to cultivate resentment among senior leadership over the years. 

Jim sighed and punched at the lift call button. "Not me, Bones." He frowned and fidgeted with his collar and McCoy was gratified that he wasn't the only one who hated the new grays. "Apparently he and my dad had a falling out. Something about—not surprisingly—pragmatism versus morality."

"So...what? He takes that out on _you_ , thirty something years later? Real classy," the doctor huffed.

"It's fine. And I didn't know you had that in you, Bones. You've always been such a...such a boy scout."

McCoy bit back a retort as the lift arrived and opened noiselessly. The view of the bay from inside was just as stunning as every other angle he had viewed it from so far today. He knew it wasn't fine, not really, but he let it go. "Maybe you're a bad influence, Captain. I just hope I didn't piss him off so much that he refuses your request."

"He won't," Kirk said. "He'll do it."

The doctor raised his eyebrows in amusement. "And how do you know that, oh great clairvoyant one?"

Kirk decided to disregard his friend's sarcasm. "Because it will make him feel good about himself."

After a moment of contemplation, McCoy figured he was probably right, and marveled that even Jim Kirk, one-time juvenile delinquent and arrogant wunderkind of Starfleet, could develop a capacity for emotional intelligence. But he wasn't done yet.

"That bullshit about Galliulin volunteering, though? What the hell?" They reached the lobby level again and stepped back out into the crowd. So many people, so purposeful, all going somewhere important, no doubt. No one gave them a second glance. He and Kirk stood there for a moment, the flow of traffic weaving around them. Kirk passed his hand over his face again as if he could wipe away the memory of the last few moments, and McCoy added that to his JAMES KIRK file of observed nonverbal tics.

"I don't know, Bones. Maybe she did, and didn't want us to know for some reason."

"Or maybe," McCoy said tartly, "he's gaslighting us. That man has an advanced certificate in psychological manipulation. She was definitely not happy about being on the _Enterprise_."

Kirk shrugged. "We may never know. She had a lot going on inside her head, that's for sure. I think...I wonder if I set her up for what happened. With that last exchange we had."

McCoy held up a hand. "Stop. No. Don't do that to yourself." He said it partly because he was too preoccupied in the here and now to give Jim his full attention, but mostly because he had somewhere he needed to be. He clapped Jim on the shoulder. "Meet me for drinks later? Hell, see if Spock wants to come."

* * *

The ride up to the eighty-second floor of Starfleet Medical made his stomach flutter and his palms sweaty, and it wasn't because of the high-speed lift. When the door slid open, he thought the carpet was different than he remembered. Bluish-gray instead of grayish-blue, maybe. This floor was quiet, serene, with recessed lighting, flooring and walls engineered to muffle conversations that happened behind the closed doors lining the hallway in both directions. The floor above, though—and the next three above that—were different, he knew. You had to have a special clearance to ask the lift to stop on those floors, and up there, the door handles were of a specific safety design and direct sight lines were carefully planned. Hidden alarms were easily accessible, and the stairwells between the floors were laid out so that they did not overlap.

It was not always quiet up there, and in fact was often weighty with all sorts of words and emotions and thoughts that could no longer be ignored and would not be acceptable in what people thought of as polite society. There was an unparalleled freedom, where rank did not matter and there was no need to posture or pretend, on those floors where Starfleet's finest ended up when they lost their marbles. He knew all of this, of course, because he had struggled through many excruciating fifty-minute hours up there on one side of the couch, so to speak, and a much briefer span of time on the even more uncomfortable side.

But he would start here, on the eighty-second. In front of another nondescript Starfleet-issue gray door.

She never seemed to age. When her door opened, he had a fleeting thought of the immortal elves in those old stories about Middle-earth. She was tiny, not even reaching his shoulders, but there was nothing delicate or frail about Commodore Anna Seifert, head of psychiatry at Starfleet Medical and his once and former supervisor. In fact, there was something comforting about her timelessness.

"Leonard. You've put on some weight. It looks good on you."

He hadn't thought about that, but of course he had. It had been a few years now since he'd seen her in person, and he hadn't exactly been at his finest at that juncture in his life, all but hollowed out with grief and guilt over his father's death; hence the brief span of time on the uncomfortable side of the couch upstairs.

"Anna. It's good to see you."

"Come in, sit down."

The difference between the admiral's office and hers was more than mere size or perspective; hers was of course on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and was as welcoming as Nogura's was sterile. Like her, the room was the same as he remembered: the books might be different, he wouldn't know, but were still piled up almost to the ceiling. The same worn rug, the battered wooden desk she refused to replace, the familiar view through her window with an occasional shuttle descending on its way to the Academy loading dock. He wished, out of the blue and with an intensity he had not expected, that she would for once turn the frames on her desk around so he could see the pictures of her family, and filed that away to consider later.

"I feel underdressed." She sat in her chair, not behind the desk but beside it, facing him, and smoothed her cardigan, this one a deep, rich ruby. He rolled his eyes, tugged at the fastener around his neck until it loosened, and slipped his cap further out of sight under his arm.

"The dress uniform? It's a long story, Anna."

She gave him a curious look in the face of his offhand tone. "Long stories are the best kind, no? Would you like some tea?"

She always offered, and he always accepted. Never mind that he hated hot tea; it was the gentlemanly thing to do, to accept what was offered to a guest.

"No, thanks." He hadn't expected that to come out, but was relieved nonetheless. _Finally_.

She paused in her picking through boxes of tea bags to look up at him, eyebrows raised.

"I...um, I don't really like hot tea. I'm sorry."

He was startled when she shot him a pleased and mischievous look. "I know that, Leonard. There is no need to apologize."

He sat back and wondered what else she knew about him that he had never told her, but she was off again before he could spend much time mulling that over.

"My intake staff tell me that you brought me two lost souls earlier today."

"Well." He paused and measured his words. "One lost," he conceded, "and one wandering around the forest without a compass, maybe."

"I see." She poured hot water from the kettle into her teacup, holding the tea bag in place against the rim so that the steam did not waft against her fingers. "I have heard the rumors about your most recent assignment. The one who got lost—that would be Janice Rand, no? How did that happen?"

"Janice…" he picked through his words carefully even though he knew there was no need to do so here, with her, and finally settled on, "Janice never should have ended up in Security."

There was a sound of disdain from his mentor. "It's those damn career aptitude tests the recruiters use."

He could not help the look of surprise on his face. He had never heard Anna swear before.

"They're garbage, based on manipulated metrics and designed to funnel recruits into understaffed areas." Her tone was uncharacteristically harsh. "They are desperate, and so many people are forced into the wrong places...but forgive me, I am inside my soap box, as they say." She sent him a thin smile.

Standard was Anna's third language and he didn't have the heart to correct her idiom.

"No argument from me on that. She ended up in a circumstance that pushed all the wrong buttons." He can tell from her expression that he's confused the situation. "Um, what we encountered on Marena brought up a lot from Rand's past. She's also requested a transfer from the _Enterprise_. When the time is appropriate, of course."

"I see." Anna was not so far removed from the everyday politics and logistics of Starfleet that she would underestimate the significance of surrendering an assignment to the flagship. Her eyes became contemplative. "I will work with her."

He felt a rush of gratitude. "She's an artist," he offered. He had once caught a glimpse of the easels and half-finished works in her quarters and knew there was a thriving art therapy program on the eighty-fourth floor.

"I thank you for the insight." Anna gave him a warm and open smile.

He realized, with a pang of sorrow, that it was the last he would hear about Janice, at least from this woman.

"And the other? The young Russian with no compass?" She dropped a sugar cube into her cup and it bobbed to the surface before disappearing into the liquid.

"Chekov just...well, he lost someone, twice, and now _he's_ lost. He's fresh off of escorting her remains and he's pretty raw. I expect he'll be stable by the time we're ready to depart."

"Hmm. All right, I can shuffle some case loads around for him. We are," she hesitated, and he saw for the first time the exhaustion wrinkling around her eyes, "we are short-staffed lately. Just now beginning to experience the fallout of the last few years, Leonard," and the way she says it, as to a peer rather than a student, dredges up conflicting emotions he's not yet ready to examine closely.

"People come into Starfleet thinking it's just an adventure, fighting for what's right, proving yourself on the way up to a command or a more exciting assignment…" she faltered, and picked up a spoon to stir the melting sugar cube into her tea, her eyes focused on the swirling in the cup. "But there is so much hurt, so much that the media and leadership does not want to acknowledge, and here we are, opening up more and more floors for the pain that they will not see."

He didn't know what to say to that, but he also didn't think she expected a response. After a moment of watching the eddy in her tea, he asked the question for which he had been screwing up his courage.

"What did you tell Admiral Nogura about me?"

The feel of the room shifted into another plane, and she sipped, looking at him over the edge of her cup. Then her brow furrowed and she shook her head, lowered the cup and placed it on the edge of her desk, keeping her eyes locked on his. "That loathsome narcissist? I've never spoken to him about you."

He wanted to believe her, but lately trust had been in scarce supply. Tea forgotten and cooling, she watched him watching her, and he thought he saw the briefest flash of dismay and disappointment in her eyes, but she was too good at this to allow that to show. He decided he had imagined it.

"You do not believe me." She said it with neither reproach nor rancor, only concern. His eyes dropped to the rug, tracing the intricate, faded patterns there.

"My god, what happened to you there, Leonard?" Her voice was gentle, inviting but not pushing. And then, because she was old-fashioned in the same way as his father and himself, she leaned forward and reached out to clasp his hand in hers, her touch warm from the teacup she had been holding. And that was his undoing, the thing that began to loosen the terrible cord of shame and self-recrimination that snaked and constricted around his soul.

The light from her window dimmed as a cloud passed by, one of the low, brooding ones that often heralded a sudden rainstorm there. He watched the shadow of it as it passed over the space of her office. He sat and breathed, and sank into the silence as she waited.

Then he sighed and finally met her eyes again. They were deep pools of blue, like his father's.

"Anna, I have a long story for you."


	9. Chapter 9

Spock had always approached a visit to adult recreational facilities—whether they were called bars, clubs, or, in this particular case, the Starfleet Headquarters Officers' Lounge—as akin to an ethnographic fieldwork experience. He observed the natives by immersing himself in their environment and, over time, having collected what he deemed to be sufficient data from multiple venues across the Alpha quadrant, he had drawn a conclusion: that the primary activities associated with these gathering places consisted of either imbibing excessive amounts of recreational-grade ethanol and/or seeking one or more partners for engaging in sexual activities. He had also observed that partaking in the former activity often increased the probability that his subjects would attempt to participate in the latter.

The former activity was the one in which his crew mates and friends were currently partaking, with great zeal. He attempted to calculate the odds of their progression to the latter and speculated, based on multiple data points, that Kirk was exponentially more likely to do so than McCoy, whose odds were vanishingly small.

He had also learned, over time and with no small degree of chagrin, not to share these speculations with his companions.

The captain and the doctor were at the moment having a fiery debate about the merits of Texas barbecue versus Kansas City barbecue. Having no vested interest in that topic, Spock let his gaze pass over the room, taking in and cataloguing a plethora of environmental factors that could influence the eventual outcomes of his subjects: the dim lighting; an overwhelming scent of cooked animal flesh; the soft background music that he identified as Gonzalez-Ortiz, early twenty-second century Earth jazz fusion; the gentle clinking of tableware; muted conversations; and a decor of a pleasantly muted color palette.

At a table near the center of the room, he spied two Qhos'nan engaged in what he knew to be—for their species—a shockingly intimate act. He averted his eyes momentarily, but the mostly human guests around them were oblivious. He supposed it appeared to be the mere holding and stroking of hands—or limbs, rather—to most observers.

" _Fascinating_ ," he murmured, and sipped his sparkling water.

"What's that, Spock?"

His captain was not yet inebriated, but he was, as he had heard McCoy once describe it, _tipsy_. He noted that in an unexpected development, the doctor had waved the server away with a shake of his head after finishing his second drink, and was now nursing a tumbler of iced tea.

"It is of no importance, Jim," he replied. There would be no benefit in exposing, as it were, the highly unbecoming-of-an-officer behavior occurring in plain sight. He made a mental note to research the sexual proclivities of the Qhos'nan in greater depth; perhaps they were a species for which exhibitionism was acceptable or even expected. If so, that knowledge could be useful should he find himself in a similar situation in the future.

He had not meant to stare, but the couple must have sensed his attention, because one of them turned an eyestalk in his direction and, after a moment, crooked a tentacle toward him in a suggestive manner. He looked away quickly and decided to conclude his research for the evening.

"I think comms may be a good fit for her," McCoy was saying. "But she'll have some time to figure it out."

"I'll make sure she has whatever opportunity she wants when the time comes, Bones," the captain replied, his demeanor uncharacteristically muted. Spock surmised they were speaking of Ensign Janice Rand. "I have a few favors I can call in."

McCoy grunted and toyed with the stir stick that had come with his drink. Janice had refused to see him earlier. But he knew he was just the safest target for Rand's anger; he winced at the memory of her waking up after surgery and finding herself in restraints and under round-the-clock observation.

"I am relieved that the planet is under quarantine, but I remain concerned," Spock said, breaking into his thoughts. "We do not know that the...entity can be contained on the planet."

Kirk frowned at his science officer. "What are you saying? It could leave and go somewhere else?"

The Vulcan raised an eyebrow. "We do not know how it got there in the first place. Perhaps it arrived from another location. There are reports of similar entities possessing the ability of interstellar travel. The creature the _Farragut_ recently encountered, for example. Incidents of homicide on Deneb Two and Rigel Four within the last few years are thought to be linked to a non corporeal entity capable of traveling between the two planets."

"Well, fuck," McCoy muttered. "That thing destroyed an entire civilization. We shoulda figured out some way to get rid of it."

Spock did not reply. Across the table, he was impassive, unblinking, and unreadable. "I would submit," he said after a moment of reflection, "that the safety of the universe cannot be the sole responsibility of the _Enterprise_."

He was right, and McCoy knew it. Jim glanced up and squinted at him. "Prolly shouldn't argue with him. That wouldn't be very logical." His words were beginning to slide together. McCoy gave him a concerned look.

"Chekov all right?" Kirk signaled for another drink and slumped a little further down in his seat. His eyes were hooded and glassy now. Spock permitted himself a revision of his earlier speculation and determined that at this rate, the captain would be fortunate to leave the premises of his own volition, much less in the company of a potential romantic partner.

McCoy took a moment to look around and collect his thoughts before responding, and his eyes widened as they wandered over the table with the Qhos'nan. "Are they—?" He whispered in Spock's direction, and the Vulcan nodded.

"Affirmative."

"What?" Kirk was struggling to keep up.

"Never mind, Jim. Chekov will be fine, I think. He's resilient and has a good support system. I also think…" he hesitated, but didn't want Jim to be blindsided later. "I think he may be considering a change of pace as well," he said as diplomatically as possible as he busied himself with collecting the unused drink coasters and stacking them in a neat pile.

"What does that mean?" Kirk sat up with some difficulty, and directed an apprehensive look his way.

"Well, I just get the impression he may be thinking about another career path, that's all. He was awfully young when he ended up on the bridge, you know. But he hasn't said anything specific."

" _Jesus Christ_ ," Kirk mumbled. "I _really_ fucked things up. Nogura was right." He motioned toward the server, who obligingly dropped off another whiskey sour. "Chekov's the best in the Fleet."

McCoy resisted an automatic admonishment as Jim tossed his drink back in one long gulp. "He wouldn't leave because of you, Jim." _Or whatever happened back there on Marena_.

"I concur, Captain. The ensign mentioned pursuing other options prior to the events at Marena."

"And no one thought it would be a good idea to tell me about this?" He laced his hands behind his head and pulled himself forward, as if to loosen a tightness in his neck, then let out a deep, groaning sigh. "No, never mind, it's not your place, that's his call. But he would be missed, that's for sure."

"Nogura was out of line putting this on you," McCoy said bluntly. Kirk flinched, and he knew it was a scalpel well-aimed. Better to lance that lie before it had time to fester.

"What happened isn't anyone's fault, unless you want to count the people who sent us down there," he continued. It was something he had said more times than he could remember lately, but it didn't seem to be getting through to anyone. It didn't even seem to matter when, as soon as they had returned to the ship and he'd finished treating Janice properly, he ran all of them through a comprehensive functional neuroimaging series and pointed out the lingering alterations, clustered mostly around their limbic systems, that had caused the emotional and behavioral anomalies they had experienced.

But he also understood how much humans, in general, struggled to reconcile the distinction between their brains and their minds. And that on a more personal level, humans abhorred and were inclined to reject the notion of being used as tools, as conduits for another being's appetite. Free will was far more appealing than determinism, even when believing in such meant affirming that one was capable of unspeakable evil.

Hell, he'd spent hours examining his own neuroimaging, then documenting the residual damage in the corpses they had brought back with them, and still had difficulty absolving himself of the pain he had caused.

" _Patience, Leonard,"_ Anna had admonished. " _Trust that has been wounded in the context of an interpersonal relationship can be restored in the same manner. And that pertains to_ all _of you involved. As a healer, you must guard against the assumption that their hurt is somehow worse than yours."_

In the here and now, he cleared his throat. "Where's Uhura?"

The Vulcan leveled his unreadable gaze at him. McCoy did not know what, if anything, she had disclosed to Spock about those wretched few minutes they had spent among the statuary, and he did not want to know. As Nogura had noted, the official report had been an exercise in deliberate minimalism, and included few details about the words or blows that were exchanged, the dreams that had ravaged their sleep, and the unspeakable impulses that had overtaken them. Spock would not have read about precisely how they had sustained their injuries, visible and otherwise. Even Kirk didn't know what had transpired between McCoy and Uhura, beyond the scene he had interrupted, him crushed against her, hand at her throat, her tears dripping down the front of him.

But he did know that his decision to assign her care to M'Benga for now was the correct one, after she had recoiled from him in the shuttle back to the ship. In fact, he'd delegated much of his clinical work to M'Benga and others, unable to suppress the image of his hands around Uhura every time he reached out to touch a patient.

And when he had found himself in the lift with her a few days ago, she had at first tried without success to slip out before the door closed, then stood facing forward, silent, as the decks flashed by.

" _Nyota_."

_She shook her head without turning, her hair swinging across her back._ " _No, Leonard. Not yet."_

When the door opened again, he let her go.

"She did not advise me of her travel plans, Doctor," Spock replied, jarring him out of the memory. There was, he thought, an unexpected hint of kindness in the Vulcan's otherwise impassive tone, and he looked away, unsure of whether Spock meant it or if he deserved it.

The intensity of the day was creeping up on him. His eyes were scratchy and raw and even the iced tea had not soothed the tightness in his throat. Sleep had been elusive for a while and fatigue was tugging at the edges of his awareness in the insistent way that he knew could not be long ignored. One look at Kirk told him that his friend was well on his way to needing a stretcher to get out of there. He pressed the palms of his hands flat against the tabletop to push himself up.

"I think I'm going to call it a night."

"I will as well," Spock said. "Captain?"

Kirk looked up, bleary-eyed. These days, he was unused to drinking to excess. The demands of captaincy had taught him some difficult lessons about moderation. But they were on leave, and grappling with a soul-shaking experience, and besides, McCoy knew that no one here would blink twice at another officer leaving with assistance from their companions. _What happens in the Lounge, stays in the Lounge_ , was the unspoken motto. He slipped an arm under Kirk's and was grateful when Spock went ahead to call the lift.

"You been raiding my chocolate stash again, Jim?" He puffed as they made their way unsteadily toward the foyer. "You're about due for your physical, so I guess the truth will out, hmm? Hate to have to put you back on salads." He ignored the string of four-letter words Jim muttered in his ear.

When they had wrangled their thoroughly-sloshed captain into the lift and called for the officers' guest quarters levels, McCoy straightened and took a deep breath. Their destination was quite a ways up, and this was not an express lift. He wondered if he should pop over to the urgent care clinic on this side of the building to pick up a hangover preventative for Jim tonight, or wait until the morning to administer a remedy intravenously. His dad had always said that a little suffering was good for the soul, but in practice the elder McCoy had tried to leaven suffering with a dose of mercy.

"She values you, Leonard. As a friend. And she always will."

Again, he was startled out of his stream of thought by the Vulcan. Before he could respond, the lift came to a halt with a soft _ding_. "Floor forty-two," it said politely.

"This is my floor," Spock said, and disappeared.

_Damn him._ McCoy was now a conflicted mess of exhaustion, irritation, and angst, trying to support a nearly dead-weight friend. He decided on the more immediate treatment for Kirk, so that he could at least sleep in tomorrow without worry and guilt. The lift stopped again.

"Floor forty-seven."

"This is us, Jim." There was no response from the man, his head lolling against McCoy's shoulder.

After a few more moments of guiding him zig-zag down the hallway to his quarters—thankfully just across the hall from McCoy's—then prompting him to place his hand on the palm scanner, his captain was safely ensconced in his room. Jim was snoring before McCoy could straighten his legs out on the bed, then he gulped in a breath and collapsed on the edge of the high-backed chair that faced the only window in the suite. It overlooked a cluster of mid-height skyscrapers, some of the lights in windows still on against the inky sky, and a well-lit stream of civilian transport vehicles passing below. He supposed bayside views were reserved for higher ranks. As he stifled a yawn and rose, trying to recall the location of the clinic, his comm unit gave off the small beep that told him he had a text message.

He flipped it open and his gut tightened. _Uhura, Nyota, Lieutenant,_ the entry read. Then he saw that there was no actual message, just a meeting invitation on his calendar for the next day, a lunch meeting at the little bistro next to the Academy where they had shared more conversations than he could recall.

His finger hovered over the message for a moment, then he tapped "accept." A tremendous weight lifted from him, one he hadn't even realized was there. He stepped to the bedside and leaned over Kirk to brush a stray lock of hair from his forehead.

"All right, Sleeping Beauty," he said, "I'll be back in a minute with a nice, happy hypo. You won't even know what hit you, and tomorrow will be a better day. I promise."


End file.
